Dan Forest stood on stage presiding in front of the crowd that had come to see Donald Trump in North Carolina Tuesday, a potential public health nightmare of not enough masks and too many people, and declared: “This looks like freedom.”
But before he could even start rattling off all the things he’d do as governor to people who weren’t there to hear him speak, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor chose to indulge once again in a baseless, strange, and shocking idea about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s future.
“We all know that Sleepy Joe's not gonna make it. Not very long anyway. That’s sad to say,” Forest said as he tried to paint a dire picture to the GOP crowd in Winston-Salem about what would happen if Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, became president.
ADVERTISEMENT
On days like Tuesday, it’s clear that Forest is trying hard to be the Trump of North Carolina. But with just eight weeks to go until election day, all that effort doesn’t appear to be making his chances of becoming governor any better.
Mired in a difficult effort to unseat North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, polls have shown the state’s GOP lieutenant governor trailing well behind the incumbent. And despite the clear attention the state has received from the Trump campaign in recent weeks, one Republican strategist in the state painted a gloomy picture of Forest’s odds, saying he is “facing significant headwinds.”
“It's a very, very narrow path and it's going to take Roy Cooper making an enormous gaffe that gets major statewide coverage for (Forest) to win,” the strategist said. “You just cannot compete against 10-to-1 spending, you just can't.”
North Carolina is a heated battleground state in the 2020 election as President Trump looks to maintain his hold on the state after his victory in 2016. At the same time, incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is trying to overcome a determined effort by Democrat Cal Cunningham in a race that could help decide which party controls the Senate come January.
A Monmouth University poll of registered voters released last week showed Forest down 11 points in the governor’s race, with Trump trailing Biden by 2 points and Tillis trailing Cunningham by 1 point. And a poll released last month by Emerson College of likely registered voters found Trump leading Biden by 2 points, Tillis behind by 2 points, and Forest 6 points behind in the governor’s race.
State campaign finance records also point to Cooper having a clear financial advantage over his Republican competitor. The latest reports through the end of June showed Cooper having raised $19.3 million this cycle with $14 million in cash on hand. Forest trailed with $6.9 million in total receipts and a shade under $2 million in cash on hand.
Neither the Forest campaign nor the state Republican party responded to emails Tuesday seeking comment. But Dee Stewart, a veteran Republican strategist in North Carolina, attributed the polling gap to Cooper still enjoying greater name recognition and a financial advantage over his Republican challenger.
“Well at some point I think that the spending differential will lessen and that the lieutenant governor will be able to come closer to spending as much money as the governor as we get down the stretch and the race will continue to tighten,” Stewart said.
Forest has made clear and consistent appeals to the state’s GOP base during the coronavirus pandemic.
In April, Forest eagerly supported Trump’s ambition for an Easter reopening of the economy from the pandemic, even as other Republicans balked at the fast-moving push that the president eventually abandoned himself. By late June, Forest was proudly championing an effort to take Cooper to court over his public health executive orders. The lieutenant governor abandoned that charge last month after a court ruled against him, according to a tweet from the North Carolina attorney general.
He further stoked controversy and dismay over the summer as he wrongly cast doubt on the science behind wearing masks during the pandemic even as public health officials and the Trump administration have emphasized a clear benefit of doing so to help stem the spread of the deadly virus. In July, he was quoted in The Hendersonville Times-News saying “there have been multiple comprehensive studies at the deepest level held to scientific standards in controlled environments that have all said for decades, masks do not work with viruses.”
“He continues to cater primarily to Republican primary voters and frankly to the Fox News audience,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist for Cooper and Cunningham. “That's not swing voters in North Carolina. He continues to have a conversation that only takes place with the base Republicans. And when you do that, you do that at your own peril in the general election.”
And then at a rally late last month, Forest was caught on camera again baselessly floating the idea that Biden wouldn’t be able to take office on inauguration day even if he defeated Trump in November.
“Can you imagine having Kamala Harris as president of the United States?” Forest said at a campaign event at the Rowan County Fairgrounds, according to a six-minute video posted on Facebook. “I mean, we all know that sleepy Joe probably won't make it to January 20 so Kamala Harris, good chance she'd be your president. And that's not funny.” Forest then added that voters would “get the most leftist candidate in the history of the United States.”
The North Carolina state director for Biden’s campaign later slammed Forest as someone who “has spread misinformation and attacked science-based strategies to get the virus under control in North Carolina, even as families have lost loved ones and small businesses have suffered.”
There’s also a sense from some that Cooper, who famously tangled with Trump over whether a full-scale Republican National Convention would be held in Charlotte, has benefited from having such a prominent leadership position during the pandemic despite the GOP outcry his public health restrictions have caused in recent months. Cooper ended up being validated in that battle after Republicans relented and canceled the Jacksonville portion of the RNC that they had moved from Charlotte in retribution for Cooper not allowing Trump the full convention he wanted.
The Monmouth poll that showed Cooper leading Forest by 11 points also found that the governor’s handling of the pandemic was well received by 65 percent of registered voters.
“Cooper’s handling of the pandemic is one reason why he is in [a] much better position than Democrats running at the top of the ticket,” director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute Patrick Murray said in a press release accompanying the poll’s results.
North Carolina formally kicked off the sprint to the election last Friday as absentee ballots started being sent out in the state. Data from the state’s board of elections showed that as of Monday Democrats had a decisive advantage of more than 246,000 over Republicans when it came to absentee ballot requests for the November election.
Shortly before ballots started going out, Trump made another blunder in his longstanding tirades about voter fraud when he appeared in the state last week and told a reporter from the television station WECT that people should try and vote by absentee ballot in North Carolina while also heading to the polls to “check their vote.” The missive led to the executive director of the state board of elections to say in a press release last Thursday that “it is illegal to vote twice in an election.”
While Trump’s repeated missteps have yet to put him in a dire situation in North Carolina, an uphill climb for Forest in the coming weeks remains clear. And even though Trump took the state in 2016, Cooper was still able to eek out his own victory for governor at the same time by topping the incumbent Republican by 0.22 percent of the final vote according to state election results.
Forest has tried to raise his profile, said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, but has struggled to break through this election cycle.
“I think politically he's got a strong base amongst Republican voters,” Bitzer said. “I'm just not sure he's branched out beyond that.”
