Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory got in the race for governor late – just 16 weeks before the primary. So how did he win?
The Charlotte paper has it:
Analysts and others who followed the race say the seven-term mayor benefited from a number of factors.
• McCrory caught the attention of some national party leaders. They helped persuade him to get in, though they appear to have remained neutral once he did.
“Folks in D.C. saw that he would make a great governor, so there was a fair amount of interest in his candidacy,” said Chris Shrimp, communications director for the Republican Governors Association.
North Carolina and Missouri now are this year’s most competitive gubernatorial races for Republicans, Shrimp said.
McCrory has spent time in Washington as a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council. He has also testified before Congress.
Richard Hudson, a senior aide to the U.S. House Republican leadership and former chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes of Concord, said some GOP leaders saw none of the other candidates emerging as a front-runner.
• Most voters were not enthusiastic about McCrory’s rivals.
Polls before he entered the race in January showed about half of Republicans were undecided. The other major candidates were not well known, and only one, former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, had ever run for statewide office.
McCrory’s two other major rivals were Salisbury lawyer Bill Graham and state Sen. Fred Smith of Johnston County.
The candidates agreed on most issues and initially spent little on television advertising, so voters had few reasons to pay close attention, Orr said.
“There was no issue where people were saying, `Did you hear what Fred Smith said?’ ” Orr said.
McCrory said the apathy came up when he was deciding whether to run.
“People were calling me up and telling me, `Look, the way people are talking about this is, the winner of the Moore-Perdue race is going to be governor,’ ” McCrory said, referring to the Democratic candidates Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue.
• McCrory was well known at home, and local supporters showed up on election day.
Voters in the Charlotte media market, home to a third of the state’s Republican electorate, already knew of McCrory. A candidate from another part of the state would have needed to spend hundreds of thousands to be on equal footing.
McCrory took 80 percent of the Mecklenburg vote Tuesday. That’s a bigger share than he got in the three most recent Republican primaries for mayor, where he received between 64 and 74 percent. He also won in every county around Mecklenburg, some by more than four to one.
Hawke said the campaign tried to maximize that advantage when deciding where to buy television time. They solidified support near Charlotte, then moved into Greensboro and Raleigh — elevating regional loyalties over ideological ones.
“In many campaigns you either have a philosophical strategy or a geographic strategy,” Hawke said, “and we had a geographic strategy.”
Republican consultant Carter Wrenn said the strategy is familiar. He used it with Richard Vinroot in the 2000 primary for governor.
“They realized it would work, they adopted it and they executed it,” Wrenn said.
• McCrory raised money quickly.
He had more than $400,000 left over from his mayoral campaign — which he transferred to his gubernatorial campaign — but McCrory needed an aggressive fundraising push. He held fundraisers in Asheville, Wilmington and other cities and raised an additional $1.2 million in three months.
Much of the money came from familiar sources — including prominent Charlotte bankers, executives and sports-team owners — but not all of it. “People would refer me to total strangers,” McCrory said, “and then I would call and go meet them.”