Speaker Tim Moore wants to become Congressman Tim Moore

He's been looking for a place to land

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North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore confirmed yesterday what’s long been rumored; he’s running for Congress in the newly drawn 14th Congressional District. Moore has been planning a move to Washington for a while. In 2022, he told people he was planning to run and then incumbent Congressman Madison Cawthorn, a darling of the MAGA wing of the GOP, announced he would switch districts and run in the primary. After the courts redrew the districts, Cawhorn ended up staying in his district and losing a primary to Chuck Edwards, but Moore was left without a district and ran for re-election to the state house instead.

This year, Moore was not hampered by a pesky court and had a district drawn for him. Moore’s home of Cleveland County is in the middle of the new district surrounded by Rutherford, Burke, and Gaston Counties. It also picks up narrow parts of Mecklenburg and Buncombe.

The primary will be the whole race. Trump won the district by 16 points in 2020 and Governor Roy Cooper lost it by ten. It’s hard to imagine a Democrat being competitive in that district.

While the district was tailor-made for Moore, his primary victory is not assured. He has one opponent, Patrick Harrigan, who ran against Jeff Jackson in 2022 when the district favored a Democrat. Other Republicans are reportedly looking at the primary, too. A big primary field can produce surprises in the low turnout elections.

Back in the mid-2010s, after one of the state’s many redistrictings, the state senate drew a map for Senator Andrew Brock. Instead of clean path to Washington, Brock faced huge field of more than a dozen candidates. The NRA got behind an unknown gun dealer named Ted Budd. Their money put Budd over the top in an election that was a winner-takes-all primary. Today, Budd is the state’s junior U.S. Senator.

Moore is from the grifter wing of the party, not the MAGA wing. He’s a small-town lawyer who went to Raleigh to make his fortune. His political career is directly tied to his professional one. He leveraged his contacts in the development world and state government to enrich himself. He crossed all of his Ts and dotted all of his Is to make sure he never crossed a legal line, but he’s got a string of shady deals that resulted in lucrative contracts. As I wrote a few years ago, one of his constituents told me, “He left for Raleigh driving beat up Honda and he’s come back driving a Maserati.”

Moore has certainly not dissed Trump, but he’s naturally more of a dealmaker than any sort of true believer. While he’s performatively supported Trump, he’s too smart to really believe in the con, even if he might respect the grift. A true MAGA candidate might give Moore a tough time in a primary, but one needs to show up soon.

Moore also faced a minor scandal earlier this year when a prominent Cary Republican accused Moore of having an affair with his wife and breaking up the family. However, Moore and his paramour both say the marriage was kaput before they began sleeping together. What’s undeniable, though, is that the woman worked for Moore and, coincidently, got a big promotion and raise.

In a more innocent time, the scandals and affair would have harmed Moore’s political career. Today, they might help him. The Party of Trump seems to celebrate petty corruption and scandals as a part of sticking it to the man. Either that or they just deny what’s in front them and pretend it didn’t happen. Regardless, the bad headlines probably aren’t much of a liability in a Republican primary in a safe GOP district.

Moore’s been looking for a place to go after the legislature for a while. He was rumored to have been angling for president of the UNC system, but that never materialized. He was expected to run after the 2021 redistricting but a bigger grifter, Cawthorn, thwarted his plans. This year, the odds look better, but he could hit road blocks from MAGA world. Filing is only about a month away so we should learn soon if he faces real competition.