Thom Tillis announced he’s not running for re-election. I started getting that feeling last week when he was bucking the budget. When he voted against it yesterday, Donald Trump berated him and threatened a primary. Now, Tillis is calling it quits.
I hope Thom Tillis has finally found his spine. He had an opportunity to lead a moderate wing of the Republican Party but spent too much time trying to stay in Trump’s good graces and appeal to a base that he didn’t truly reflect. Now, Trump and the base have turned on him and he has nowhere to go.
I want to be able to cheer for a newly freed Tillis. I don’t expect him to become any sort of liberal, but I’m glad he told the truth about the big, ugly bill costing North Carolina $38 billion over the next ten years. He also knows it will kick tens of thousands of North Carolinians off of Medicaid and many live in Republican areas. I just wish he had found that courage when he was voting to make Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense and RFK, Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary. He knew better and supported them anyway.
Expect the GOP primary field to get crowded in a hurry. There are already a couple of third tier candidates who wanted to take on Tillis in the primary. Now, some Members of Congress are likely to make the leap. Here’s my list, in no particular order.
Rep. Richard Hudson is Chair of the NRCC. He’s a proven fundraiser who has deep ties to big money. He’s been in Congress since 2013 while keeping a relatively low-profile. He’s always reminded me a bit of Richard Burr, not the brightest bulb in the room but with good political skills and instincts. He’s not charismatic but he does his homework.
Rep. Chuck Edwards is the Congressman from Western North Carolina who has seen his profile rise because of Hurricane Helene. He got relatively good marks for helping his constituents during a disaster. While he’s not got the experience or ties that Hudson has, he’s generally well-liked, despite a recent accusation that he pushed or hit a constituent.
Rep. Tim Moore may see an opening that can fast-track his grift. He could get elected for a six-year term and not have to worry about being held accountable every two years as he continues to enrich himself as a public servant. He would follow Tillis as the second GOP House Speaker to seek a U.S. Senate seat.
Senate President Pro-tem Phil Berger is getting a little old to run for US Senate, but it would give him out from his primary with Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page. A side prediction is that if he doesn’t run for Senate, he also won’t run for re-election.
Mark Robinson—please! Mark may see an opportunity to make a comeback. We can only hope.
Michele Morrow has been threatening a primary against Tillis. Now, she may see an opportunity to galvanize the GOP base against an establishment creature. She’ll probably find money is much harder to come by in a US Senate race, but she sure add entertainment value.
Some other state legislator may make the jump but they’ll probably have a hard time putting together the money if one of the Members of Congress gets in. Buck Newton comes to mind, but he’s already tried to move up once and failed so he’s probably going to take a pass.
Former Congressman Dan Bishop could give it a shot. He could galvanize MAGA better than anyone mentioned so far. He’s a far right, anti-LGBT politician who came up just shy in his race for attorney general in 2024.
Former Congressman Mark Walker also doesn’t seem to want to go away, though he should probably know better by now.
It will also shake up the Democratic side. Tillis was a wounded candidate with real political problems. Whoever replaces him won’t have the same problems, though they might have some other issues. The GOP has a long history of nominating candidates outside of the political mainstream for statewide office.
Tillis’s retirement adds uncertainty, something most politicians want to avoid even if it comes inherently with the job. Every potential candidate is looking at the race differently now. Republicans probably see an opportunity to reset the race. Democrats know they have an opportunity to define a candidate who is not yet known.
I suspect Roy Cooper will take a pass now. He runs the risk of becoming a victim of the generational shift happening in the Democratic Party. Running against Tillis put him in a head-to-head with a damaged candidate on equal footing. He doesn’t know what a 2026 campaign looks like until he knows who the GOP nominates. It could be a flawed candidate too far to the right for North Carolina or it could be a relatively mainstream candidate who looks like more of a fresh face than him. That’s a lot of uncertainty for a guy who could go out on top.
If Cooper gets out, then Attorney General Jeff Jackson is the logical next choice. He would likely start the race as the frontrunner and all the advantages that holds. He could begin a general election campaign early with a huge advantage over a lesser known Republican.
If Jackson takes a pass, candidates like former Congressman Wiley Nickel and former Congressional candidate Dan McCready start the race on equal footing with the unknown Republican nominee. They will need to build name recognition and organization quickly. At best, they will start the race as a toss up with their Republican counterpoint on the other side of a March primary.
Maybe other Democrats will jump in the race, though nobody comes to mind. The GOP and Democratic primaries will likely be hot commodities over the coming months. Expect more surprises and buckle up.
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Please, North Carolina, get this right.
The GOP in NC is doing everything it can to take away voting rights and ignore the real needs of people, instead they are pushing theocratic and misogynistic culture wars. Mark Robinson-style.
We deserve better.
Tillis didn’t find a spine, he just lost his taste for abuse. Or he figured out that running behind a generic Republican in polling for a seat he’s been elected to twice didn’t bode well for another bid.
He has a history for voting for things he knows are fundamentally wrong — he just does it because it’s politically expedient. That much became apparent in 2012 over the Amendment One issue, when he said — in the press — that the amendment would “probably be repealed in 10-15 years”, but he was willing to make a temporary change to our state’s foundation document because enough people were convinced that one group gaining a right meant they were going to lose one. And that idea of a zero-sum game is what keeps Fat Donny Two-Times in good books with his base. As long as they believe in that paradigm, he’s going to have their support. If — and it’s a big if — they ever cotton on to the notion that just because somebody else has the right to [ fill in the blank ] it doesn’t mean that *they don’t* the Republican Party as we know it today will cease to exist, because there will be nobody to register with it.
Tillis played that same song, just a little bit more melodiously, his entire career. From the NCGA to the US Senate. And if he’s gotten sick of the sound of it, good. I hope it haunts him to his grave. Along with every other despicable vote he’s cast and every slime coated nominee he’s voted to confirm. He’s finally found himself on the other end of the whip, and he hasn’t got the belly for it. Or maybe all the time I wrote and pointed out that he had a choice to side with North Carolinians or Trump, but it was a binary choice and he was gonna own whichever one he made. And if he wasn’t ready to do that he should resign his seat now. He didn’t go quite *that* far, but this is the next best thing.
As for who might try to replace him — on the GOP side, Lara Trump's name was mentioned along with all the ones Thomas listed when I first heard about this around 2:30 this afternoon. The current RNC Chair’s name (which I’ve already forgotten) got some buzz too, though he’s not confirming and the RNC is denying.
On the other side, Wiley Nickel’s been running an email campaign and raising funds for months in preparation for a run against Tillis. He’s probably built some name recognition out of it, but his problem is going to be that with TIllis gone, he can’t campaign as the Not-Tillis, which has been the cornerstone of his campaign to date. If he can pivot to a message that’s more about *him* and what *he can do for you* and less about how shitty his opponent is he could make a go of it. This is the advantage Roy Cooper already has. He’s held statewide office for the best part of 2 decades, and might be the most popular politician in the state on either side of the divide. What might keep him out of the running is that he’ll be 69 when 2026 rolls around, and that would mean he’d finish his term at age 75. I’m not sure he wants to make politics a lifetime vocation, and I wouldn’t blame him for that. Hell I’m only 65 and that wouldn’t be an appealing prospect to me. But if he did run, and win (which he would), I think he’d be an excellent Senator.
This brings us to Jeff Jackson, who has none of the problems that either of the previous two do. He’s young, and he won his race for AG running as “basically a normal person”. He didn’t cut his opponent any slack, but he didn’t demonize him either. And he connects with people in a way that should serve as an example to every Democrat everywhere. That won’t just make him a good candidate, it’ll make him a good Senator. Not to mention there’s little chance we’ll see town halls outside his Raleigh office hosted by a life sized cardboard cutout of him. My only hesitation would be the question of what would become of the AG’s office if he’s campaigning for Senate, and especially if he wins? It’s a SLOG running a political campaign, but in that way the NCGA may have done him a favor by kneecapping his authority. If he can make the point that the Republicans in the legislature left him with a lot of time on his hands, it might work out for everybody. At least politically. And presumably his replacement would be appointed by Josh Stein to keep the chair warm until 2028.
But for today, let’s all take a breath and hope that this newfound freedom will prod Tillis to vote with his constituents for a change. That’d be refreshing, if unlikely.