Thoughts About Why Everyone Got Mad At Cal Cunningham, and Evidence We're Not Making That Mistake Again
Beyond the obvious, I mean.
When a candidate gets caught cheating on his wife and loses his election by 1.75% after leading the polls tape-to-tape, it’s pretty easy to say that the final result confirms your priors. Whether you think Cal Cunningham’s affair was a black swan that derailed an otherwise winning campaign, or you think his lead was always illusory and Thom Tillis was going to win, or you think Cunningham could’ve won but his affair wasn’t the proximate cause of his loss, there’s information out there somewhere to support your theory of the election. Consequently, it’s hard to point to a clear lesson in the 2020 election in North Carolina. You can’t even say “don’t cheat on your wife” is an obvious lesson, considering Donald Trump won North Carolina again.
Whether it was decisive or ultimately tangential, it’s difficult to argue that Cal Cunningham getting caught cheating on his wife didn’t at least hurt. His campaign went silent for several days, a month before Election Day, when the story broke; his approval ratings went underwater, even when head-to-head numbers looked steady; the affair dominated news coverage of the election, either through continuing developments specific to the affair or through adjectives like “scandal-plagued” getting appended to Cunningham’s name everywhere; the state’s largest newspaper pointedly refused to endorse in the Senate race after having planned to endorse Cunningham; and Tillis and the GOP hammered North Carolina airwaves with negative ads about the affair. Republican pollster Glen Bolger, both before and after the election, made it clear that he believed the affair made a difference for Tillis. Based on all that, I’m going to start with the assumption that getting caught cheating was damaging to Cunningham.
If there’s a particularly useful question about what the NC Democratic Party can learn from the 2020 Senate race, one that could not only have a discernible answer but guide the party in 2022, I’d say it would be: Was the affair damaging to Cal Cunningham in particular, moreso than it would’ve been to another candidate? And if so, why?
You would hope that anyone running for Senate in North Carolina, in the wake of John Edwards and Cal Cunningham, has the good sense not to cheat on their spouse. (Granted, you would’ve hoped that Cunningham had the good sense not to cheat on his spouse.) It doesn’t have to be an affair, though. Any candidate could face a scandal – anything on the scale from Edwards’ infamous and repulsive cheating, to “but her emails”-level disproportionate coverage of an actual blunder, to wholly invented smears like Donald Trump’s insinuations that Joe Biden has dementia – and any candidate could suddenly see their campaign dominated by innuendo or outright attacks. It’s an open question how vulnerable they are when that story hits.
For the 2022 Senate candidates, the answer to the first part of the question is going to be that yes, Cunningham was particularly vulnerable, so the affair was particularly damaging. If you thought Cunningham wasn’t particularly vulnerable, you wouldn’t run in 2022, because you’d expect to lose: it’s a Democratic president’s midterm instead of a Republican president’s re-election year, you don’t get to share a ballot with Roy Cooper, and you don’t get to run against Thom Tillis, who was widely unpopular (though if NC Republicans nominate Pat McCrory in 2022 that’s the next-worst thing). The 2022 Democratic nominee will be running into stronger headwinds than Cunningham faced in 2020, so the whole theory of a winnable election in 2022 necessarily requires an assumption that there was a winnable election in 2020.1 The easiest way to support that assumption is to argue or suggest that Cunningham was a bad candidate, and the easiest way to make that argument without implying culpability in the loss for the Democrats who got behind him in 2020 – Democrats who you need to get behind you now, Democrats who might include you and your campaign staff – is to suggest that Cunningham’s affair revealed or exacerbated weaknesses that Dems can’t be blamed for missing beforehand.
There are two answers for why Cunningham was particularly vulnerable that are emergent in how the 2022 Senate candidates have messaged around their campaigns, but I’m only going to describe them in brief because they center on largely unquantifiable variables like enthusiasm and campaign quality.
There’s the argument that Cunningham was vulnerable on a categorical level: the argument could go that Cunningham was necessarily someone who wasn’t exciting and couldn’t generate enthusiasm, a moderate white man with a thin résumé, a style-over-substance lawyer already kind of reminiscent of John Edwards, and once he was caught cheating there was nothing to him that kept people bought into his campaign. You see this argument in Cheri Beasley talking about the need for a Black woman in the US Senate (where there are currently none) and having a dual fundraising page with Florida candidate Val Demings, inviting supporters to be a part of further opening the doors of opportunity in a way that Cunningham couldn’t; you see it in how Beasley cites her experience winning elections statewide, and how Jeff Jackson cites his record in the NC Senate, to prove that they have a résumé where Cunningham didn’t; you see it in every candidate avoiding the “moderate” label that Cunningham didn’t shy away from. The NCGOP insistently referring to Jackson as “Cal Jr.” makes it clear they see being superficially similar to Cunningham as a vulnerability – setting aside that the NCGOP knows damn well what they’re really implying – and it’s a vulnerability that some media outlets have leaned on to frame the primary.
Then there’s the argument that Cunningham was vulnerable because of how he ran his campaign: the argument could go that his 2020 campaign was so impersonal, driven by fundraising and ad spending with few public appearances, that once Cunningham was caught cheating nobody felt particularly attached to his candidacy and he didn’t feel worth defending. Jackson’s stump speech sets up this argument almost explicitly, as he describes political consultants who advise him against public appearances or transparency and recommend hammering five focus-grouped slogans for a year and a half; he doesn’t have to name Cunningham for it to be clear who he’s talking about,2 and his positioning of his town-hall approach as a rebuke to those consultants is a rebuke to Cunningham as well. Beasley, while not making the argument as explicitly, has already been much more prolific with the sort of public appearances and travels across the state that Cunningham only made in the final weeks of his race after his affair had dominated news coverage; Beasley is working to get people invested in her candidacy now, while Cunningham seemed to keep a rolodex of photo-ready small businesses locked in a case labeled “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF TOTAL EMBARRASSMENT”. Beasley also described herself in one interview as “the Cheri Beasley that people of North Carolina know…the Cheri Beasley who has wonderful relationships with people all across this state”, which makes for a conspicuous contrast with Cunningham, whom the people of North Carolina did not know and who h̶a̶d̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶d̶e̶r̶f̶u̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶h̶i̶p̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶t̶e̶ was mostly well-connected just within Democratic Party leadership.
Hindsight and confirmation bias are going to drive a lot of this analysis, since there’s not much else to go on – even a poll directly asking why a respondent is voting for a given candidate is just a likely to tell you about partisan cues as it is to tell you about how the candidate is doing. (I did look for polling on enthusiasm in 2020, but it was inconclusive in a vacuum and there’s nothing from the 2022 cycle to compare it to yet anyway.) That’s not to say this analysis isn’t meaningful, or that Cunningham was generating enthusiasm and running an engaging campaign; it’s just beyond the scope of this post and calls for more intuitive analysis than I want to offer here.
Instead, I’m going to focus on an issue where polling data can, hopefully, tell us something. The argument is that Cunningham was vulnerable because he was unknown – the argument could go that beyond who he was or how he ran his campaign, North Carolinians had no prior associations with his name before the election, so Cunningham cheating on his wife became the first thing (if not the only thing) people thought of when they thought of him.
This is another argument you can infer from how the Democratic candidates are campaigning and messaging. Beasley has fairly frequently referenced winning statewide twice before, and her 2020 loss in her run for a full term as Chief Justice of the NC Supreme Court was by only 401 votes; if you’ve been a regular voter in North Carolina for the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve already voted for Beasley at least once. Additionally, her gradual increase in travel across the state along with her use of virtual appearances means she can build on that name recognition in a more personal manner than an ad-driven campaign. Jackson has focused on the town hall approach, promising to hold a town hall in all 100 North Carolina counties over 100 days, in addition to sporadic town halls he’d held prior to launching that effort and allusions to holding town halls after the 100 days is over; it’s easy to imagine it being a boon to Jackson’s name recognition if people can actually meet him, or if once they see him in their county they tell their friends and family about it.
Regardless of how the candidates strategize for the rest of the 2022 cycle, we can at least try to figure out if data around 2020 and 2022 makes a case that North Carolina Democrats are doing better on name recognition now than they did last cycle. This is more concretely measurable, since pollsters can test name recognition and it’s something where you’d expect a poll result to reasonably track with reality. If it was the case that Cunningham being unknown made him vulnerable, and that Democrats can do better on this in 2022 than in 2020, you might expect to see:
Cunningham having low name recognition in 2019-2020, both in terms of people not having heard of him and people who have heard of him having no opinion of him
Cunningham’s favorability decreasing after news broke of his affair
Beasley and Jackson having higher name recognition now, in 2021
For point #1, here are three polls showing where Cunningham’s name recognition was before he became the nominee. Note that the latter two are D-affiliated pollsters or sponsors.
July 29-31, 2019 (AARP/Fabrizio & Ward): 9% of respondents have an opinion on Cunningham; 69% haven’t heard of him, 23% have heard of him but have no opinion
January 8-12, 2020 (ALG Research/End Citizens United): 28% of respondents have an opinion on Cunningham
January 10-12, 2020 (PPP): 32% of likely Democratic primary voters have an opinion on Cunningham; 67% not sure
The other polls from before the 2020 primary didn’t test favorability and name recognition – many of them didn’t even test the primary, just matching Cunningham against Tillis – but polls of the Democratic Senate primary did show a clear undecided majority until the final weeks, which is another point to suggest low name recognition. It’s particularly distinct since Cunningham would run against an incumbent; the July 2019 poll had 58% of voters with an opinion on Thom Tillis (20% never heard of, 22% no opinion), and the ALG poll had 72% of voters with an opinion on Tillis.
I already mentioned what we saw for point #2, so here I’ll elaborate briefly on why I think it supports the argument that Cunningham being unknown made him vulnerable to a scandal.3 A drop in approval rating could suggest soft support evaporating, or people who hadn’t formed an opinion hearing about him and not liking what they hear; hearing about Cunningham’s affair is a logical explanation for why either of those would happen. Thom Tillis’ approval in 2020 was lower, but it had been baked in for years; late-breaking scandals, like Tillis not wearing a mask for events at the White House and then contracting COVID-19, didn’t move the needle.
For point #3, there’s one poll testing name recognition for 2022 Senate primary candidates, from Cygnal/Civitas (R-affiliated), May 6-8, 2021. Here’s where the leading candidates were on name recognition in that poll:
The margin of error is fairly wide here, but there’s enough information to draw a couple conclusions about when the poll was conducted:
Pat McCrory is well ahead of everybody else on name recognition. (I didn’t include it in the table, but he’s also the only one of the six whose net favorability is underwater. I do not think that this is a coincidence.)
Jeff Jackson is at parity on name recognition with Republican candidates Ted Budd and Mark Walker, and Cheri Beasley is likely ahead of them.
Most importantly for the main argument here, all three Democrats are doing better on name recognition than Cal Cunningham was at this point in the 2020 election cycle, especially Beasley and Jackson. Beasley might even be ahead of where Cunningham was by January.
I’d say that’s mostly good news for Democrats. Whether the nominee is Cheri Beasley or Jeff Jackson, it’ll be someone who is better known to North Carolinians than Cal Cunningham was, and unless it’s Pat McCrory, they’ll be running against someone who isn’t any better known than they are, so late-breaking scandals on the Republican side may actually have an impact this time.
The Cygnal poll is over a month old at this point, so the state of the race may have changed since then, but what information we have on the Republican side of the primary doesn’t point to a recent shift in name recognition. For example, you might think Ted Budd’s name recognition could go up following Donald Trump’s endorsement of his campaign at the 2021 NCGOP convention, but a Budd internal taken June 9-10, 2021, found that only 20% of Republican primary voters knew the endorsement had happened. The same poll had only 32% of GOP primary voters with an opinion on Budd, compared to 72% with an opinion on McCrory and 26% with an opinion on Mark Walker. That’s better for Budd and McCrory than the Cygnal poll, but it’s actually a step back for all three Republican candidates from an earlier GOP primary poll by Spry Strategies, taken April 21-24, 2021; that poll had 43% of GOP primary voters with an opinion on Budd, 90% with an opinion on McCrory, and 47% with an opinion on Walker. As it stands, it’s not clear that Trump’s endorsement is putting Budd on GOP voters’ radars, let alone the voters he needs to win the general election.
Long story short, neither Cheri Beasley nor Jeff Jackson is starting from Cal Cunningham’s position as a near-total unknown to North Carolina voters running against a known quantity, and neither candidate is coasting on ads and fundraising the way Cunningham did in 2020. If you’re sympathetic to the argument that Cunningham was particularly vulnerable to a scandal in 2020, and you’re looking for a sign that the Democratic nominee in 2022 will be a stronger candidate than Cunningham was, I think there’s evidence to support you.
There is a counterargument that 2022 could be an easier election for the Democratic Senate candidate than 2020, one that is a stated belief of the Chair of the NC Democratic Party: 2020 was in the midst of a global pandemic, in which Democrats unilaterally stopped canvassing and in-person events, and 2020 had an incumbent Republican president campaigning in North Carolina to drive up Republican turnout. The argument goes that, with Democrats able to campaign in-person again and Trump off the ballot, 2022 can be a more favorable environment than 2020. Beasley and Jackson are already taking advantage of the ability to campaign in person, and the limits of Donald Trump campaigning for someone who isn’t himself were visible in 2018, so there’s some reason for optimism; however, state and national organizations aren’t acting like they really believe this makes NC more viable, with outside ratings bearish for Dems in NC compared to 2020 and more emphasis placed on other states by Dem-affiliated organizations. It’s also not a strong argument for the actual candidates, since it applies to any swing state and not just North Carolina; it doesn’t explain why NC stayed red while five states flipped blue, and it doesn’t let a candidate argue that NC’s Senate seat is as pivotal a cause for volunteers and donors as re-electing Raphael Warnock and Mark Kelly or flipping Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A candidate explaining why NC is worth the investment needs to make a state-specific argument, especially to counter pessimism from NC Democrats’ four-election losing streak (despite record campaign spending) in US Senate races.
If you’re wondering whether Jackson’s stump-speech jeremiad against opaque and calculated campaigning could be a shot at Beasley, the answer is no – aside from whether it’d be an accurate description, he’s been giving that stump speech since before she entered the race, and it’s not all that different from his rhetoric about campaigning even prior to 2020. It does double as criticism of earlier (especially Republican) candidates who have run the same type of campaign in past years, but the specifics and the context around how to run a primary campaign establish that it’s about Cunningham’s 2020 run.
It’s worth mentioning that the ALG Research poll write-up above says Cunningham being unknown is a positive for him, since he could build on his head-to-head numbers as his name recognition went up – absent the affair, that may have looked like a good call, but it’s also easy to read it as spin given the Dem-affiliated source.