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CHARLOTTE, NC – Voters from a Republican-leaning North Carolina parliamentary district will choose a new representative Tuesday during a special election that will test the influence of President Trump on 2020 and Democrats' ability to break through with the kind of suburban voters who propelled them. by the majority of the House last year.
The polls close at 19:30.
The race opposes Dan McCready, a democrat and veteran of the Navy, whose motto is "political party", against Dan Bishop, a Republican senator who was approved by Mr. Trump and congratulated himself that his president calls Mr. McCready "ultra-liberal party". "Who" really admires socialism. "
Putting his political capital on the line, Trump campaigned with Bishop on Monday night in Fayetteville, in the eastern part of the Conservative district, hours before the polls opened. And vice-president Mike Pence also helped out on Monday, staging a rally in Wingate, Nc, on behalf of Bishop.
The ninth district covers part of Charlotte and a number of exurban and rural counties in the east. He has not been represented by a Democrat since the early 1960s and Mr. Trump won by almost 12 percentage points in 2016. But in the middle of 2018, Mr. McCready , surfing on the national anti-Trump mood, led a tight race. , losing by 905 votes against the Republican candidate of the time, Mark Harris.
Then comes one of the most bizarre plots of recent American politics: the state's electoral council canceled the entire election and commissioned a new one after there was evidence that Harris's campaign funded an illegal vote-collecting plan in the rural Bladen County.
McCready, a 36-year-old businessman, has decided to keep running and has been campaigning for 27 months. Centrists, he's focused on the issue of affordability of health care and criticized Bishop for opposing the expansion of Medicaid under the Health Insurance Act. affordable care.
Mr. Bishop, a 55-year-old Charlotte lawyer, may be best known throughout the state for sponsoring the so-called lavatory bill that required transgender people to use gender-sensitive toilets. indicated on their birth certificate. He boasts of his support of the National Rifle Association and has repeatedly attacked Mr. McCready by associating him with the leftmost elements of the Democratic Party.
Mr. Trump tweeted his support for Mr. Bishop and sent a fundraising email on his behalf. In July, Bishop spoke at Trump's rally in Greenville, New Zealand, where the crowd responded to the president's attacks on Somali-born Democrat representative Ilhan Omar, chanting:return it!
The election is indeed the last campaign of the 2018 season, and what is worrying is that she remembers the mid-term elections: like a lot of races last year, a centrist Democrat has collected much more money than the Republican candidate in a historically conservative context. district that is now leaning towards the political center because of the suburban drift of the GOP
And as in many special elections leading up to, or near, democratic victories since 2017, local Republicans have signaled to Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence to make up for the disparity in enthusiasm between the two candidates.
But as acknowledged by leaders of both parties, the president is not only a lever of participation for Republicans, he also inspires Democrats and some leftist independents.
With Democrats aggressively winning early votes and McCready enjoying considerable fundraising advantage until outside conservative groups rush into the publicity campaign, Republicans did not have a chance to raise money. Other choice than to call in reinforcements from the 11th hour.
A loss of Republicans after such a presidential intervention would raise doubts about Mr Trump's appeal in a state on which his reelection campaign depends. But that could be even more worrying for the G.O.P. A number of incumbent Republicans were already choosing their retirement rather than standing for the next year when Mr. Trump was on the list of candidates and their chances of winning back the majority seem increasingly weak.
If Mr. Bishop lost or even narrowly won, this could trigger a new wave of Republican retirements to Congress: 15 lawmakers in the House of Republicans have already declared that they would not run for re-election.
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