US midterm elections: Curtain-raiser in North Carolina is 'ground zero' for Republican attempts to retake the Senate

For a moment in Big Ed’s, a Southern-themed eatery in downtown Raleigh with jugs of iced tea lined up behind the counter and a sign reading “Kiss my Grits”, it seemed as if Thom Tillis, the Republican candidate for the US Senate in North Carolina, had forgotten his opponent, so often was the name Harry Reid evoked.

The confusion is understandable. Mr Tillis, the speaker of the House in the State Assembly, is actually trying to oust the incumbent Democrat Senator Kay Hagan. But there is no escaping the bigger picture in this race: for the Republicans nationally it is vital he wins here if they are to achieve their goal of seizing control of the US Senate, where Mr Reid currently presides as Majority Leader.

“We have to send Kay Hagan home and we have to fire Harry Reid as Senate leader,” declares Mr Tillis to loud cheers in a brief stump speech inside the restaurant, berating his opponent for “rubber-stamping” the agendas of the Majority Leader and also of President Barack Obama, notably on healthcare reform.

If the first victim of a Republican takeover would be Mr Reid, the second, of course, would be President Obama, who would face spending his final two years in office stymied not just by the House of Representatives, as he already is, but by the Senate too. It would surely spell the final stalling of his legislative agenda.

Because this year’s mid-term congressional elections on 4 November are all about the Senate – a flip of control in the House is not expected – it follows that all almost all the energies of the two parties are focused on the roughly eight states where senate races are up in the air. The Republicans need a net gain of six seats and are marginally favoured to get there.

But for the Republican revolution to happen, everything has to fall into place. And in North Carolina they have a problem. Senator Hagan was long considered one of the most vulnerable of the Democrat incumbents, in part because of the unpopularity here of Mr Obama. Yet Mr Tillis is finding the going unexpectedly tough. A poll out today by Civitas showed him trailing Ms Hagan 42 to 46 per cent, in line with several polls over the past month.

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The party is rushing in reinforcements. Last week it was Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. Joining him was Senator Rand Paul. Both are party superstars and possible presidential prospects for 2016.

For Messrs Bush, Paul and others, including Hillary Clinton, the midterms are a chance to test the waters for their possible bids, even if no one has yet declared. “You can tell obviously by my travels and by the people who have come to work for our organisation that there is an interest,” Senator Rand told the Associated Press this week. “We’re not sitting passively by and doing nothing. We’re building a nationwide organisation.”

How much help Mr Bush and Mr Paul are being to Mr Tillis is not clear. There were awkward moments last week when Mr Bush, the brother of the former president, laid out moderate views on education and immigration reform at odds with those of Mr Tillis, who must rally sceptical conservative Republicans in the state if he is to win. Senator Paul, a Tea Party favourite and libertarian standard-bearer, should have been a better fit. But the jury is out on that also.

“North Carolina is ground zero for taking back the Senate,” Senator Paul averred in a statement of the obvious, cutting an oddly unimpressive figure in Big Ed’s, shuffling between tables in ill-fitting jeans and crumpled shirt mostly avoiding the very specific questions some of its patrons were putting to him. It is perhaps one of his greater misfortunes that he is a light to the moths that flutter on the flakier, more extreme fringes of the Republican fold.

Certainly, Tiffany Beikner, a 40-year-old Tea Party activist dressed in sparkly red, white and blue, had come to Big Ed’s to see Mr Paul before anyone else. She explains that she has no love for Mr Tillis, whom she considers too moderate, but will vote for him holding her nose because of what is at stake for the Senate as a whole. “I think Tillis will be horrible,” she says. “It’s not for North Carolina that I’ll vote for him but for the balance in the Senate, because, you know, we do have a communist for a president, a communist who is trying to destroy this country.”

Corey Sturmer, 28, a software salesman, may not vote at all. If he likes anyone in the room it is Senator Paul, but the fact of his being here disappoints him. “I think Rand is kind of compromising himself by stump campaigning for Tillis,” he suggests. Few here forget that in the primary elections last spring, Senator Paul endorsed Mr Tillis’s Tea Party opponent for the senate nomination.

The Tillis-Hagan contest remains too close to call and is also clouded by the presence on the ballot of an independent candidate, Sean Haugh, who is currently taking about 4 per cent of votes.

But Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, a hand-to-hand combat instructor and Republican candidate in Raleigh for the State Assembly, thinks Mr Tillis can still pull it off. And that Mr Reid will be losing his job. “It’s still early and I think the race is probably still evenly split,” he says.