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Conservatism, Practicality and Loyalty
A perspective from Alex H. Jones
The staid primary for U.S. Senate is about to be enlivened with a bold pallet of color. When Michele Morrow runs for office, she has an impact. Dragging a long string of controversial gestures and radical positions in her wake, the suburban extremist, not long ago a homeschool mom, makes every race a spectacle. Morrow is running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. She will be much more than a sideshow.
Despite her extreme profile, Morrow poses a credible challenge for the nomination. Her fellow MAGA-ite Mark Robinson suffered such a devastating loss for governor that he was no longer a viable candidate for office. Morrow, less personally degenerate than Robinson though possibly even more extreme, ran competitively for Superintendent of Public Instruction. She received 48% of the vote in 2024. From a simple electoral perspective, Morrow can make the case that she is still a viable candidate for statewide office.
Opponents arguing that she is unelectable will have to speculate about how she would fare in the future race with different dynamics. I think it will be difficult to convince pro-Trump voters that Morrow’s candidacy is foredoomed.
The thinking of MAGA voters is supremely important for evaluating Morrow’s chances in the primary. That’s because the North Carolina Republican electorate has converted overwhelmingly to MAGA politics. In 2014, Thom Tillis was able to skate by in a primary by monopolizing “moderate” (relatively speaking) voters while Mark Harris and Greg Brannon split the Tea Party vote. Some skeptics of Michele Morrow’s candidacy may be tempted to draw an analogy between this year’s primary and the 2014 precedent, with establishment choice Michael Whatley as the Tillis. But the NCGOP is no longer divided between establishment and populist Republicans.
Instead, the vast majority of the party’s voters have converted to Trumpism. Almost 80% of NCGOP voters told a CNN pollster that they were either “conservative” or “very conservative.” Carolina Journal, a conservative outlet with a solid reputation for gauging Republican-voter opinion in our state, found that N.C. Republican voters overwhelmingly identify as Trump Republicans rather than traditional conservatives. This preference was on display when the man himself campaigned for the nomination. Donald Trump won the 2024 North Carolina Republican presidential primary by 73% to 21%—even though his opponent was from our neighboring state of South Carolina.
So Morrow, Whatley, and pro-MAGA attorney Don Brown will all be competing for a relatively homogenous pot of right-wing populist voters. The question of who wins the primary will be decided by who does the best among the party’s MAGA majority, not who picks up the MAGA baton and who settles for the semi-alienated moderate fringe that still remains. And while Whatley has presented himself as 100% Trumpian, there is reason to believe that MAGA voters harbor doubts about his fealty. For example, Steve Bannon stated plainly that Michael Whatley was “not MAGA.” Morrow’s strong MAGA credentials clash vividly with the tepidness conservatives have shown toward Whatley.
How should Democrats feel about this? Great. While Morrow will be able to tell conservatives that she came close in 2024, the truth is that her Senate candidacy would likely end in disaster. She lost by a narrow margin for Superintendent. But Mark Robinsonwon a down-ballot election in 2020 before imploding on an epic scale when he ran for governor. Leading the Republican ticket against a man in Roy Cooper whom she has said should be executed, Morrow would probably become nationally notorious and lose by a wide margin.
Pragmatic Republicans should fear this outcome. Democratic donors should seriously consider putting money behind Morrow’s candidacy. And the smartest thing Donald Trump could do to prevent a debacle would be to offer her a job. In the coming months, we’ll see just how loyal the Donald is to former RNC Chair Michael Whatley.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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