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Straight-ticket votes hurt, McCrory says
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Published: November 11, 2008
RALEIGH
Pat McCrory, who lost a close election for governor last week, said yesterday that he was done in by a wave of straight-party Democratic voters motivated by Barack Obama.
McCrory, the Republican mayor of Charlotte, also said he may run again for statewide office in North Carolina.
"I will consider that," he said in an interview.
McCrory faced long odds from the beginning. He ran in a year in which the Republican Party overall was deeply unpopular, and his opponent, Democrat Bev Perdue, was better financed and had statewide name recognition from her eight years as lieutenant governor.
Perdue beat McCrory in last Tuesday's election to become the state's first female governor. She got 2.1 million votes to McCrory's 1.9 million. Libertarian Mike Munger, who probably pulled votes from McCrory, got about 120,000 votes.
"Man, we almost upset a power structure in Raleigh," said an obviously disappointed McCrory, who ran as an outsider who could bust through what he branded as the "culture of corruption" in state government.
"We made them twist a little bit. So I think the biggest impact was the Obama ground game that came to North Carolina in the last six, seven weeks."
He said he expected to win the governor's race up until results started coming in from early voting. About 42 percent of the state's registered voters cast ballots during early voting or by absentee ballot this year.
A large number of those early voters were responding to efforts by the Obama campaign, which relied on early voting to increase turnout among black voters and young voters, especially in urban areas. And the Obama campaign also promoted straight-ticket Democratic voting, which helped Democrats all the way down the ballot.
The result was that Perdue won all of the state's large urban counties -- even McCrory's home county of Mecklenburg. That was a big surprise, given that McCrory has won seven straight elections in Charlotte, a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans.
But last week's results show that Perdue won Mecklenburg County by 385 votes. The results are unofficial because state elections officials are still counting provisional ballots.
"It's ironic that the urban areas defeated an urban candidate," McCrory said.
Perdue is from New Bern, and her political base has long been the rural areas of Eastern North Carolina.
McCrory also expressed frustration with several negative ads that Perdue ran in the final weeks leading up to Election Day. He called the ads both "brilliant and shameless at the same time," and said they were factually untrue.
McCrory ran a mostly positive campaign, and he said yesterday that there is nothing he would have done differently.
"We ran, I think, one of the most effective statewide campaigns in the history of our state. And we broke about every rule in North Carolina politics," he said.
McCrory pledged to work with Perdue's administration, and he said he would keep up the pressure on issues he cares about, such as transparency in government, transportation reform, and reducing crime.
Perdue named her transition team yesterday and in the coming weeks will be choosing the new members of her administration. She will be inaugurated on Jan. 10.
McCrory remains the mayor of Charlotte. He has not announced whether he will run for another term as mayor next year.
Four years from now, when Perdue is up for re-election, it is hard to imagine that the environment for Republican candidates will be as bad as it was this year. But McCrory said he hasn't decided if he'll try for a rematch.
"I'm going to continue to hopefully play a positive, constructive role in hopefully changing the culture of state government and politics," he said. "I hope the defeat does not prove that our positive campaign cannot succeed."
■ James Romoser can be reached at 919-210-6794 or at jromoser@wsjournal.com.
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