Watching state House Speaker Thom Tillis give his acceptance speech, I couldn’t help but think how easy he had it. That was not a hard-fought primary. It was a coronation. 

As I pointed out earlier this week in Creative Loafing, money made all the difference. Tillis was going to win the primary, but it took $2 million from Karl Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to keep him out of a summer runoff. 

But for all the talk about Greg Brannon, and how crazy a candidate he turned out to be, the real story of the 2014 U.S. Senate primary is how pastor Mark Harris failed to live up to his god given potential, and how tragic that is for our politics, and for real people in North Carolina who needed a voice. 

Three months ago I wrote a cover story for Charlotte’s Creative Loafing newspaper previewing the matchup between Harris and Tillis, and wondering whether their contest, “could settle the civil war waging within the GOP.” In the end, the battles never took place. 

Tillis ran to the right. Harris emulated him on every issue. 

Allowing room for Greg Brannon to unite the far-right coterie of stoned Ron Paul libertarians, obsessed with the Federal Reserve, the middle-aged, underemployed, Glenn Beck audience who’ve bought every book by Sarah Palin, and expect the world to end within their lifetime, and diehard Tea Party patriots, too ignorant to understand the history of that 1773 event, and why it’s anti East India Company underpinnings are opposite to everything they stand for today. 

Brannon assembled those voters (some of them with no business participating in national politics) into a base of support constantly showing up as 10-15 percent in early polls, and ultimately resulting in 27 percent of the primary electorate. 

But Brannon was always going to get blown-out in a runoff, and run out of national politics. Other journalists pointed to his court problems, being found liable for previously misleading investors, while Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski had a field day with Brannon’s outrageous comments, and his plagiarism. 

It was a wonder why Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee were dumb enough to tie themselves to Brannon, given his extreme views, and obvious character issues. But those two senators are playing a game to build clout for future ambitions. Their support of Brannon had more to do with their own dreams, than their faith or trust in Brannon. 

How skeptical the national Tea Party movement was of Brannon was evidenced by how little FreedomWorks spent on his behalf, that Senator Ted Cruz never touched him, and that the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund ignored him, when they’ve been picking fights across the country. To them, Brannon was simply not worth the effort. 

It became painfully clear Brannon was a self-righteous, second-rate, candidate. Without the formal legal education of Mike Lee and Ted Cruz (each clerked for Supreme Court justices) Brannon memorized the constitution, and like a man in mid-life crisis who buys a boat with no idea how to use it, he decided to take it out for a spin. And he crashed. 

So the larger conservative movement avoided North Carolina because Brannon freaked them out, and because Harris put them to sleep. 

From day one, Mark Harris had the background to mount a serious challenge to Tillis, and the potential to actually win in November, which Brannon never had. 

Harris needed to run simply as a preacher, a healer for hurting communities torn apart by globalization, poverty, crime, and drug overdose. 

A chance to change North Carolina politics by appealing to its non-voters: socially conservative, fiscal liberals in rural parts of the state, who blame corporations for their economic problems, but still shop at Wal-Mart, and who’ve never set foot in a Starbucks in their life.

Tillis has no message for those voters, except less taxes and fewer regulations, and calling Kay Hagan’s vote for Obamacare the worst thing to ever happen in America. Those people are decent enough to know that’s bullshit, and that’s why they don’t vote. 

Harris’s insurgent campaign could have reached them, through honest appeals about how society strayed from God’s chosen path, through celebrity worship, violence and drugs, apathy, crony capitalism, and to him, gay marriage. 

That was the sort of hopeful campaign that could have won in November, by building a new coalition: traditional Republicans united with disaffected voters. It would have been a positive campaign, hard for Kay Hagan to attack without offending the sincere beliefs of good Christian voters. 

Now Hagan and Tillis will fight it out in a nasty war of attack ads. And nothing about the State of North Carolina, or our political process will be better for it. 

Harris was the only candidate with the opportunity to run a positive and inclusive race. But when former congressman Robin Hayes came onto his campaign, it was a bad sign, a real life Tiny Duffy to handle Harris just like Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. 

Harris swallowed partisan talking points about Obamacare, and spent the early months of the primary attending Tea Party events instead of building his own flock. 

According to this insightful study by Democracy Corps: “Evangelicals feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss. They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a ‘culture rot’ from the outside. The central focus is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns. They embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back. But the Tea Party base is very libertarian and not very interested in fighting gay marriage.” 

In other words, evangelicals love the Tea Party, but the Tea Party loves the constitution more than God. 

Harris wasted months wooing Tea Party members who were never going to like him back, – and never got to give the speech, or make the YouTube video, or write the campaign platform that would’ve changed the game. 

If his campaign failure is God’s punishment for Amendment One, then Amen! But Republican politics needed a socially conservative champion for the little guy. He may blame gun violence on video games, but at least he cares, and that’s more than you can say about the wing of the party that won.   

In this matchup against Tillis, Harris could have represented broken people against the corporate sycophants who sold them out. But he never tried. And that’s not just his loss, it’s our loss too.