Some conservatives dissatisfied with Thom Tillis are preparing to write in Rhodes for U.S. Senate. Who is John Rhodes? He’s a former Republican (now unaffiliated) member of the North Carolina House of Representatives who served from 2003 to 2007. Rhodes was a conservative firebrand in the House, sort of a precursor to Larry Pittman and Mike Speciale today. Rhodes, who was not considered a ‘team player’ was targeted for defeat in the Republican primary and went down to a little-known Cornelius town commissioner named Thom Tillis, who was recruited into the race by those who thought Rhodes was an ineffective member. With a huge cash advantage, Tillis won the primary in a landslide, won the general, and has been serving in the House ever since.

That was in 2006. Now, Rhodes, a real estate broker, has reemerged, and he wants your vote – especially if you’re a conservative. Rhodes made news earlier in the Republican Senate primary earlier this year, not as a candidate, but once more as a gadfly. Seeking to derail Tillis’s bid for higher office, Rhodes said he planned to file several ethics charges against Tillis. Among other things, Rhodes charged that Tillis had paintballed a neighbor’s barn back in 2005 and refused to clean it up and brought official correspondence between the two to prove it. Tillis denied paintballing the barn and said he didn’t want to pay for the cleanup because doing so might be seen as an admission that he had done the act. Rhodes’ attempts to halt Tillis in the primary failed, but Tillis’s failure to win a majority in the primary was a sign that many rank-and-file Republicans thought the Speaker wasn’t conservative enough.

The overwhelming majority of those who voted against Tillis in the primary are supporting him in the general, but there remain a couple of holdouts. In an annoyance to the Tillis campaign, runner-up Greg Brannon has failed to endorse him, something that would have helped greatly in bringing conservative diehards into the Tillis camp. Some of these conservative holdouts are staying home, some are voting for Libertarian Sean Haugh, and a small number of them are writing in Rhodes. It appears that Rhodes’ support is concentrated among a few conservative activists and Tea Party groups in the Mecklenburg County area.

The conservative activists’ complaints about Tillis and their reasons for writing in Rhodes are legion. But for them, Tillis’s worst sin, by far, is his advocacy of toll roads, something they see as government encroachment and creeping socialism. Perhaps ironically, they plan to write in Rhodes in order to protest toll roads.

It’s unknown how large the “write-in Rhodes” movement is, but it’s probably less than 1,000 people and confined to people who post in the conservative NC blogosphere and hardcore Tea Party activists. Rhodes’ name comes up when conservative and Tea Party dissatisfaction with Tillis is covered, but not in more general articles about the U.S. Senate race. Rhodes has a nice, well-put together website, but his grassroots campaign has only 343 ‘likes’ on Facebook and his personal Twitter page has only 55 followers. The Facebook page says that both Hagan and Tillis are ‘progressives’ and contains images with critical messages of Tillis, toll roads, Common Core, Agenda 21, the U.S. Senate race in Mississippi, and this atrocity:

thom hagan

Rhodes, of course, has a number of hurdles to overcome if he wants to win the U.S. Senate race. He suffers from very low name recognition, no money, and hasn’t expanded his support beyond several hundred conservative true believers. And write-in campaigns, even with a well-known name, are rarely successful: the last winning effort was Lisa Murkowski’s in Alaska in 2010. Before that, it was Strom Thurmond in 1954. Both of them had prior service in the U.S. Senate and were a known quantity to voters. Finally, the write-in requirement arguably disenfranchises voters who do not know how to spell. A disproportionate number of write-in Rhodes voters probably fall into this category. Then again there is the possibility his voters will go into the voting booth with toll roads on their mind and unconsciously write-in “John Roads” instead of “John Rhodes”, invalidating their ballot. Rhodes is not discouraged, saying that all he needs to do to win is to get more votes than anyone else, but says that will only happen if voters want to embrace “radical change.”

When all is said and done, Rhodes probably won’t have any impact on the race whatsoever. He stands even less of a chance of being elected to the U.S. Senate than Sean Haugh, who is at around 6% in the polls and is being supported by outside groups on digital media. But his presence in the race does illustrate there is some conservative discontent with Tillis. It’s probably not widespread, but if Tillis loses two weeks from now, Tea Party activists will almost certainly say it was because he wasn’t far enough to the right.

1 Comment

  1. Someone from Main Street NC

    Speechless to be reminded that Tillis is too lefty for some NC voters. This state is insane.

Related Posts

GET UPDATES

Get the latest posts from PoliticsNC delivered right to your inbox!

You have Successfully Subscribed!