Former Bathroom Bill Sponsor Wins the GOP Primary in North Carolina Race

The last undecided race from the 2018 midterms heads to a final vote in September.

Dan Bishop.Chuck Burton / AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

It’s official: Dan Bishop, the sponsor of North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill,” is the Republican nominee for the last undecided House race of the 2018 cycle; he’ll face Democrat Dan McCready in a September election in the state’s ninth district. 

This election has been a months-long, scandal-laden saga. Last November, Mark Harris, the original GOP nominee in the race, appeared to eke out a victory over Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes, but it soon came to light that Harris allegedly paid a political consultant to illegally collect absentee ballots. The State Board of Elections voted across party lines to hold a new election.

Harris ultimately dropped out of the new race due to health concerns, endorsing Stony Rushing, a county commissioner and Confederate apologist, on the way out.

Bishop entered soon after. He released ads that attacked Democratic female politicians, called progressives “gun grabbers,” and falsely claimed he cast the deciding vote for a bill “to end infanticide.” The Club for Growth, a conservative PAC, put up more than $70,000 toward Bishop’s campaign, and Ted Cruz tweeted an endorsement.

Rushing campaigned as a man of the people (specifically, of the people who hang out in swamps).

“The same establishment insiders that fought against President Trump want to keep me out of Washington, too!” said Rushing in an ad, wading through the brackish waters of the 9th district. “But when you grow up in the country, you learn to deal with things that come out of the swamp.”

It wasn’t a winning strategy.

The election has cast a light on North Carolina’s electoral infrastructure. The state is famous for its gerrymandering. Every electoral map since 2010 has “basically been declared illegal, in one sense or another,” according to Tom Wolf, a lawyer for the Democracy Program with the Brennan Center for Justice. A recent bribery scandal within the state’s Republican party has only elevated concern, and a battle over voter ID laws looms for the 2020 election.

McCready appears to be building a campaign around North Carolina’s failure to preserve its democratic values in a new ad. “This is bigger than just a seat in Congress,” he says in the video released yesterday. “This is about: What does it mean to live in a democracy?”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate