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Perdue will face McCrory in race for governor
The Associated Press
Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue celebrates her primary victory the over State Treasurer Richard Moore Tuesday night in Raleigh.
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Published: May 6, 2008
Updated: 05/06/2008 10:15 pm
RALEIGH
Democrat Beverly Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory will face off in November for the right to succeed Gov. Mike Easley.
Perdue, the state's lieutenant governor, and McCrory, the long-time mayor of Charlotte, won out after tough primary campaigns, according to unofficial results. Both State Treasurer Richard Moore, who challenged Perdue for the Democratic nomination, and State Sen. Fred Smith, R-12th District, McCrory's major challenger in a four-way race, conceded late Tuesday night.
With 41 percent of counties reporting, Perdue had 55 percent of the vote to Moore's 41 percent. On the Republican side, McCrory had 45 percent of the vote to Smith's 38 percent.
Perdue and Moore ran ambitious, well-organized and well-financed campaigns. They each raised about $7 million during the primary campaign — far more than any of the candidates on the Republican side — and they have filled the TV airwaves with television ads.
Their platforms were similar, with both emphasizing how they would improve the economy, expand access to higher education and expand health care.
The signal moment in the campaign came last month, when Perdue announced that she would stop running negative ads against Moore. Until that point, both candidates had attacked each other aggressively, and Moore had been rising in the polls.
After Perdue pulled all of her negative ads, Moore continued his attacks, but they appear to have backfired.
One Moore ad, for instance, criticized Perdue because a store that she is the co-owner of sold some merchandise containing the image of the Confederate flag. Another one of his ads attacked her for having once voted against a bill to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan.
Perdue responded to those attacks by rolling out a number of prominent black leaders in North Carolina who attested to Perdue's support for civil rights. Some black voters said they were offended by Moore's ads, and polls showed Perdue retaining her strong support among black voters.
"Obviously, the turning point in this campaign was when Perdue made her positive pledge," said pollster Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, a Raleigh firm. "What it did was it completely threw the Moore campaign off its game. They just did not know how to respond. And the things that they did to respond have turned off every demographic."
A third candidate in the Democratic primary, retired Air Force colonel Dennis Neilsen, did not run a major statewide campaign and was expected to finish in the low single digits last night.
Because of her large campaign war chest and strong name recognition, Perdue enters the general election as the early favorite.
McCrory, however, as the mayor of Charlotte, enjoys strong support in and around his home city, the state's largest. He defeated Smith, a state senator from Johnston County who had a strong base in the eastern part of the state and among rural voters.
The Republican race went down to the wire, with polls in the final week showing it to be a dead heat. The Triad region, where McCrory and Smith were running virtually tied, was seen as a key battleground in the race.
McCrory has a reputation as a moderate Republican and a pragmatist who crossed party lines in a Democratic-leaning city. But in his run for governor, he tried to position himself to the right, taking a hard-line stance on illegal immigration and focusing on the need to crack down on gang-related crime.
He entered the race relatively late, not officially announcing his candidacy until January. And his campaign relied heavily on television advertising to build support in parts of the state beyond Charlotte.
Smith, in contrast, relied on a methodical, retail-style campaign. He held campaign barbecues in all 100 counties and distributed free copies of his autobiography to voters. He emphasized his life experience, including being the head of two companies and serving in the state Senate.
Three other Republican candidates were on the ballot but none of them appeared to receive more than 10 percent of the vote last night. They are Bill Graham, a lawyer from Salisbury; Bob Orr, a former justice on the N.C. Supreme Court; and Elbie Powers, a farmer from Franklin.
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