WASHINGTON — Tiffany Breaux Pritchett and George Scarbrough were the type of voters Democrat Cal Cunningham needed to win if he were to defeat incumbent U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina.
She was a former Republican voting for a mix of Republicans and Democrats. He was voting near straight ticket for Democrats. Both had moral objections to President Donald Trump. And neither was willing to vote for Tillis, the Republican seeking reelection.
But in the end, the late-campaign revelation of Cunningham's marital infidelity was too much for them to support him.
Voters like these helped Tillis win a narrow victory in North Carolina's pivotal U.S. Senate race. Cunningham called Tillis to congratulate him on Tuesday, one week after Election Day. Tillis led by close to 100,000 votes on election night and, though officials are still counting votes, had an insurmountable lead.
"The voters have spoken and I respect their decision," Cunningham said in a statement Tuesday, his first remarks since Election Day. "While the results of this election suggest there remain deep political divisions in our state and nation, the more complete story of our country lies in what unites us: our faith and sense of confidence in our democracy, our civic values and common humanity, our shared aspiration to care for one another, and our belief that we live in a country that does exceptional things.
" ... Though this isn't the electoral outcome we worked for, I'll always be grateful to be a North Carolinian, and I'll always believe that our country's best days are ahead."
Tillis, 60, had declared victory on Nov. 3. He was congratulated by Republican Senate colleagues on Monday when the chamber returned to work. In a statement Tuesday, Tillis said "I wish nothing but the best to Cal and his family going forward."
"I know that my job is fighting for the jobs of the hardworking people of our state, which is why my first postelection priority will be defeating COVID-19 and getting the economy back on track. North Carolinians have a solid record of weathering storms and coming back stronger than ever," he said.
Tillis won 48.7% of the vote and Cunningham won 46.9% in unofficial results as of Tuesday.
Pritchett worked in the George W. Bush administration and in the Bush White House. But disgusted by Trump and much of today's Republican Party, she changed her registration to unaffiliated before the 2020 election.
A 40-year-old real estate agent in Hillsborough, Pritchett voted for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and was leaning toward Cunningham before the allegations of infidelity surfaced. She voted for the race's Libertarian nominee, Shannon Bray.
Bray and Constitution Party candidate Kevin Hayes won 4.3% of the vote combined, which is more than 145,000 votes.
"I was certainly leaning toward him. When the news of the affair broke out, I just didn't like how he handled it," Pritchett said this week in a telephone interview. "Maybe that's a shallow thing. but if I am that adamant about character this cycle, I felt I couldn't hold my nose and vote for Cal. It felt hypocritical."
Scarbrough, a 29-year-old Democrat from Raleigh, had similar thoughts.
"It would not have sat right with me with moral objections to President Trump over infidelity and things like that and if I then turned around and voted for Cal Cunningham," said Scarbrough, who said he couldn't back Tillis because of his support for Trump.
After Cunningham, a married father of two, admitted in early October to sending sexual text messages to a California woman, who later said the pair was intimate as recently as July, the Tillis campaign focused its closing message on Cunningham's character.
They tried to paint Cunningham as untrustworthy and dishonorable and played up the fact that the California woman was married to an injured military veteran. Cunningham is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces an Army investigation.
In his victory speech, Tillis thanked supporters for "letting everybody know that the truth still does matter, everybody know that character still matters, and let everybody know that keeping your promises still matters."
It mattered to Pritchett and Scarbrough. They were the type of voters that Cunningham needed if he was going to defeat Tillis, especially in a close race: first, disaffected Republicans or unaffiliated voters and second, reliable Democrats.
And while two voters is not enough to draw wide-ranging conclusions about what cost Cunningham the race — he led in polls throughout the campaign and held a solid lead in late September — their experiences match up with what the Tillis campaign said its data was showing.
The less voters knew about the scandal, the more inclined they were to support Cunningham. The more they knew, they more they broke for Tillis, said Paul Shumaker, Tillis' campaign strategist. The Tillis campaign and Republican allies moved to make sure as many voters as possible knew with an ad blitz and repeated appearances by Tillis in the race's final days.
Cunningham apologized for "the hurt" his behavior had caused his family, but he declined to answer specific questions about the affair or the possibility of other women. He stopped alerting media to his appearances with voters, a rarity for candidates.
"I've taken responsibility for the hurt I've caused in my personal life. I've apologized for it. I've said what I'm going to say about it," Cunningham said early in October.
Scarbrough said he didn't change his mind on Cunningham based on the first reports.
"I was going to see what he said and how it happened and all the information that came out. With personal things, stories can be a little bit different than what comes out initially," he said. But "once I started to hear a little bit more details," he said, he opted not to vote for Cunningham.
He said he does not regret his vote, even now that Cunningham has lost and Republicans have 50 seats in the U.S. Senate before two runoff elections in Georgia. Scarbrough said his grandmother gave him some grief for not voting for Cunningham, but nearly everyone one else understood his decision.
"When I was a younger voter, I would not have thought it would have mattered to me," he said of the personal failings. "People and voters change."
Pritchett can attest. She wrote in Jeb Bush's name in the 2016 presidential election and proudly supported Biden this time. She said she will likely remain unaffiliated for now. But Cunningham's handling of the situation was a deal breaker.
"How he handled it spoke more about his character. Those things matter. Actions speak louder than words," she said. "When I saw how they handled it: We're done here."
It was the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history with more than $287 million spent by all candidates and outside groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The race was seen as critical for determining which party would have control of the Senate moving forward. Tillis, who has been in the Senate majority his entire first term, said he carried a "heavy burden" in a race that was a "majority maker."
Cunningham, 47, tried to keep the campaign focused on health care and his support for the Affordable Care Act. He attacked Tillis for his votes against the health care law and tried to portray Tillis as someone more interested in defending special interests than in serving the people of the state.
"The end of this campaign does not mark the end of our need to improve access to health care, strengthen education, heal racial wounds, and create better jobs. These are causes that still must be championed," Cunningham said Tuesday.
Tillis said he was bothered by the attacks about him looking after the wealthy.
"They were trying to paint me as some guy that only worries about the rich. I don't worry about the rich, ladies and gentlemen. God bless them for being rich," Tillis said during his victory speech. "What I worry about are the people that grew up like me."
The Cunningham campaign was confident it had chosen the right path — focusing on health care and the coronavirus pandemic and staying away from the scandal — before the election results came in.
"The race has never been about Cal as much as Tillis has tried to make it about Cal in the last month. It's always been about Tillis and, specifically, his failure to look after North Carolina families, especially on health care," Jackson said.
And some voters stuck with Cunningham, even if they were aware of the scandal.
Jack Rorick, a 60-year-old unaffiliated voter from Charlotte, said on Election Day that he usually splits his ticket, but voted straight Democratic because of Trump. He voted for Cunningham, but was aware of the scandal.
"Yes. Once he's elected we could look for his replacement, too," he said Tuesday.
Tillis and Republicans had tried a variety of attacks on Cunningham earlier in the campaign — over his critiques of the Paycheck Protection Program, from which his former company received a loan earlier in the pandemic; over his use of a North Carolina tax credit for repairs, including a "butler's pantry," at his historic Raleigh home; over his comment in the first debate that he'd be "hesitant" to take a coronavirus vaccine if it were available before the election; and over his vote as a state senator to raise taxes in North Carolina.
None seemed to stick or gain much traction — until the scandal. Polls showed Tillis narrowing the gap in the final month, though many attributed some of it to formerly reluctant Republicans deciding to support him. Still, Cunningham's personal failings provided an opening that had not been there previously.
"It was a stubborn race that has been fairly stable, not a lot of movement. Something was going to have to happen to give the race an identity of its own, so that it's not just a microcosm of the national picture, and I think the scandal is what did that," said Jordan Shaw, Tillis' 2014 campaign manager and a consultant for the campaign.
