Budd Wins North Carolina Senate Race Against Beasley, Keeping Seat Republican
(Bloomberg) -- Republican Ted Budd defeated Democrat Cheri Beasley in their closer-than-expected race for a North Carolina US Senate seat, a crucial victory for the GOP’s efforts to flip at least one chamber of Congress.
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Budd, a congressman, defeated Beasley, a former state Supreme Court justice, according to television networks NBC and ABC. The seat became open with the retirement of Senator Richard Burr, also a Republican.
Budd was endorsed by Donald Trump in a state where the former president registered his smallest electoral margin of victory in 2020. Budd won Trump’s backing after his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, decided against running for the seat.
Budd was among the 147 House Republicans who voted to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election hours after a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. When a clip of him saying President Joe Biden won the election circulated during the Republican primary, he said it had been taken out of context. Burr, in contrast, voted to certify Biden’s electoral victory.
A Marist poll taken just days before the election showed Budd and Beasley tied among registered voters, but Budd with a 4 percentage-point lead among people who said they definitely planned to vote.
He sought to tether Beasley to Biden and the president’s sour approval ratings, a tactic that Republicans deployed nationally. He also benefited from historical factors that favored Republicans. since the party in power typically loses seats during midterm elections in a president’s first term.
But North Carolina also hasn’t sent a Democrat to the upper chamber in more than a decade.
Beasley tried to attract voters outside of North Carolina’s liberal strongholds of Charlotte and the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. She tried to encourage turnout among women and independent voters by focusing on the US Supreme Court’s June rollback of federal abortion rights.
Budd, who has served three terms in the House, supported a bill that would ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Like Republicans around the country, he made crime an issue, and accused Beasley of going easy on criminals when she was on the bench.
--With assistance from Ryan Teague Beckwith.
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