Alan Blinder and Richard Fausset

That was less than seven years ago.

These days, the question is how much Republicans may have set their project back with a recent string of remarkable self-inflicted wounds.

“It’s never a dull moment with the Republicans here,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist and an ally of Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democrat whose November 2016 election was helped along by the protracted fight over a Republican-backed bill limiting the bathroom choices of transgender people. “Every time we think it can’t get worse, they figure out a way to dig deeper.”

This week, federal prosecutors announced that the chairman of the state’s Republican Party, Robin Hayes, had been indicted on charges of bribery and other crimes related to a scheme they said was designed to aid a major donor, who was also charged. The revelation came almost six weeks after Republicans faced the rare embarrassment of watching their seeming victory in a congressional race unravel after it became clear that their nominee had financed an illicit voter-turnout effort.

For the state’s Republicans, who rose to power by railing against cases of Democratic corruption and promising to be a positive disrupting force, the fresh scandals amount to a staggering record of self-disruption.

For the state’s liberals, it has been a moment to bask in schadenfreude. Over the last several years, they watched and warred with North Carolina Republicans amid aggressive conservative efforts to deregulate industry, play down climate change, curtail access to the ballot box, strip a Democratic governor of some executive powers, launch their so-called “bathroom bill” and gerrymander districts in ways that made the courts recoil.

Republicans won some of those fights and lost others, but the hard-right turn plunged the state into years of intense partisan warfare rife with high-profile boycotts and large-scale public demonstrations.

It is this record, and the recent bouts with scandal, that could also affect state and national elections next year.

Cooper will be up for re-election, as will Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican whose delicate political situation was recently underscored by his opposition to — then eventual support of — President Donald Trump’s controversial executive action to fund a border wall.

And once again, this battleground state will be up for grabs in a presidential race — one that will unfold as Charlotte, the state’s largest city, hosts the Republican National Convention, where Trump is likely to make his case for re-election.

But there is also a chance that Democrats might end up ensnared in the most recent federal probe.

The donor who was charged, Greg E. Lindberg, chairman of an investment firm in Durham, gave money to both parties. In the indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors said Lindberg worked with Hayes to bribe the state insurance commissioner, Mike Causey, with campaign donations in the hopes that Causey would replace a state regulator who oversaw a company Lindberg owned.

Hayes, who is a former congressman, Lindberg and two other men who were charged pleaded not guilty Tuesday in appearances before a federal magistrate in Charlotte.

Causey, a Republican, tipped off federal investigators about possible corruption and later worked closely with them during their protracted inquiry. In an interview Wednesday, Causey said he did not expect Republicans to be alone in facing the fallout.

“This is certainly not a party thing,” Causey said, adding, “I think when the facts come out, you’re going to see both parties in the same boat.”

Causey would not elaborate, and a spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

Although the indictment focused on Lindberg’s dealings with Republicans, his ties to Democrats have also been under scrutiny in recent months.

Wayne Goodwin, a former insurance commissioner who is now chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, accepted donations from Lindberg and later consulted for him. Goodwin told The Wall Street Journal this year that he was not a target of the federal inquiry, with which he said he cooperated.

The speculation around Goodwin, who has not been charged, did not keep his state party operation from taking a gleeful swing at its opponent. In a statement, Democrats mashed the scandals together and also nodded to the turmoil surrounding Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., whose ties to Lindberg were referenced in the indictment that became public this week. (Walker was not charged with a crime and was not identified by name in the indictment.)

“Bribery. Election fraud. Witness tampering. Lying to the FBI,” Wednesday’s Democratic Party statement declared, adding that 2019 would be the year when “North Carolina Republicans’ corruption finally became public” and the party’s leading figures “became fully engulfed in chaos.”

Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican consultant in North Carolina, said the allegations of chicanery created “a smell in the air and around the Republican Party.” The party, he said, would do well to try to quickly isolate the scandals.

Indeed, the Republican Party played down the idea of chaos, even as it moved to put a limited distance between itself and the accused. In a statement Wednesday, it said Hayes had “relinquished most of his day-to-day duties” and that another Republican leader, Aubrey Woodard, had been named acting chairman. On Monday, the day before his indictment became public, Hayes said he planned to step down later this year as party chairman, citing his health.

The indictment is a dramatic turn of events for Hayes, 73, a former state House majority whip whose family founded the Cannon Mills textiles company, and who has long been an advocate of integrating biblical principles into state government. He opposes abortion and was criticized, in an unsuccessful 1996 run for governor, for supporting a sex education curriculum that promoted abstinence and recommended cleaning genitals with Lysol disinfectant after sex.

To critics, the new instability is a consequence of the party’s years of dominance, when they controlled the Executive Mansion and had a supermajority in the General Assembly.

“Until this year there’s been literally no check on these folks, except for the courts,” said Allison Riggs, a senior lawyer at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who has been involved in fighting Republican redistricting efforts in North Carolina.

Pat McCrory, a business-minded former Charlotte mayor, was elected governor in 2012 and helped cement Republican power in North Carolina. But the party’s state legislative leaders often set the aggressive tone. In March 2016, Republicans led the charge on the law that became known as HB 2, which curbed legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and set new restrictions on transgender bathroom use.

The resulting national backlash, with boycotts and threats of boycotts, allowed Cooper, who was then challenging McCrory, to argue that Republicans were harming the business climate. In November 2016, on a night when Trump won the state, Cooper did, too, by a slim margin. A few months later, he and the Legislature arrived at a compromise to repeal the law.

Last year, the Republicans’ power was further weakened when they lost their veto-proof majorities in the Legislature.

But they are majorities still, proof of the continued power of conservative ideas in North Carolina.

In an interview in his office on Wednesday, Sen. Phil Berger, the president pro tempore of the North Carolina Senate and long one of the most influential Republicans in the state, cautioned against drawing immediate conclusions about how the scandals would influence voters.

Still, he acknowledged that it was “frustrating” that scandals were so often overshadowing Republican policy achievements.

“Stepping on a rake,” Berger said with a light chuckle. “I see it as some Republicans doing something that creates problems for the vast majority of Republicans who haven’t done anything wrong.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/us/north-carolina-republicans.html" id="0153ff07-4ac0-3b77-ac09-205c362bae71">The New York Times</a>.

RALEIGH, N.C. — When Republicans took control of virtually every lever of North Carolina’s state government for the first time since Reconstruction, they set out to transform the historically moderate Southern state into a more conservative stronghold.

Like 'Stepping on a Rake': A Wave of Scandals Hits North Carolina Republicans

He is outgoing Rep. Robert M. Pittenger, whose narrow loss to Mark Harris in the Republican primary in May is just about as studded with red flags suggesting absentee ballot fraud as the general election now under scrutiny.

As with the November general election, most of the concerns about the primary center on Harris’ extraordinary success with absentee voters in Bladen County, a rural swath of southeastern North Carolina where L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a shadowy contractor with a history of suspect voter turnout efforts, worked for Harris’ campaign.

In that primary against Pittenger, Harris won 437 of the 456 ballots cast through the mail in Bladen County; his overall margin of victory was only 828 votes. By contrast, in an earlier run against Pittinger in 2016, Harris won only four of 226 such ballots in the county. Dowless did not work for Harris in that campaign.

North Carolina officials are now examining the May primary to see whether they could establish patterns of election fraud and gather evidence for possible criminal prosecutions.

“I’m old fashioned, but anytime somebody may have broken the law, it’s appropriate for the state to look into it,” said Carter Wrenn, the dean of North Carolina’s Republican strategists. “If they found that somebody broke the law in the primary, they ought to punish them. Just because the primary got certified, if you broke the law to win it, that doesn’t get you off the hook.”

In the meantime, the potential chicanery in the November balloting, when Harris appeared to prevail over his Democratic rival, Dan McCready, by 905 votes, may lead to a new general election, and that may give Pittenger a second chance.

Though state officials are normally limited in their ability to overturn a primary outcome that has already been certified, Republicans in the state Legislature pushed through a bill Wednesday calling for a new primary if state election officials order a redo of the general election. Such a move would essentially revert the 9th District Congressional race back to square one.

State investigators, who announced last week that Dowless was “a person of interest” in the general election inquiry, have not made any public accusations of wrongdoing in response to allegations that Dowless and his associates violated state law by improperly collecting or completing absentee ballots this fall.

J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, who has examined the Bladen County balloting in the primary, noted that 156 Bladen absentee ballots went unreturned in this year’s primary, the highest number of any county in a district that includes far larger counties.

Dowless, a 62-year-old former car salesman with past convictions for fraud and perjury, has repeatedly declined to comment about the current controversy, and his lawyer did not respond to messages.

As Democrats and Republicans alike gird for the possibility of a new election, hints that Dowless was deeply involved in the primary season have begun to emerge. Dowless told one man, who described the encounter in an affidavit, that he had a team of more than 80 people working for him in an operation that stretched far beyond the county’s borders.

And in Bladen County, one volunteer for a local candidate, Kenneth Simmons, said Dowless boasted that he was hoarding hundreds of completed ballots to bolster his clients. Simmons’ own affidavit, provided by a lawyer for the state Democratic Party, was released Tuesday.

Weeks before the May 8 vote, Simmons, a former Bladen County sheriff’s deputy, attended a meeting for supporters of Billy Ward, a candidate who hoped to knock off the incumbent county sheriff, James A. McVicker, in the Republican primary.

Simmons and his wife, Kelly Diane Simmons, knew that Dowless was working to get Harris elected. “He tried to get me to vote for him,” Kenneth Simmons recalled in an interview Monday with The New York Times, before his affidavit was released.

The couple said they assumed Dowless was trying to help the Ward campaign, too — although Ward, in a separate interview Monday, said that while Dowless attended his team’s meetings, he never formally worked for the campaign.

“I can’t trust him, but he’s the guru, sir,” said Ward, a police captain in nearby Tabor City. “He’s unscrupulous.”

The Simmonses said that at one point during the meeting, Dowless spoke to them while holding a thick packet of documents that they could not see up close. They said Dowless boasted to them that he had 800 or 900 signed and completed absentee ballots in his possession, and that he planned on turning them in to the county Board of Elections just before the deadline. (In the end, state officials reported just 811 absentee-by-mail ballots were cast throughout the entire 9th District in the Republican congressional primary.)

Simmons said that he was not well-versed enough in state election law to know that possessing another person’s absentee ballots is, in most cases, illegal. But he had other questions.

“What I couldn’t comprehend is, if you get the ballots why don’t you go ahead and turn them in every week?” Simmons said. “Why hold them?”

“I asked him why he had not turned them in,” Simmons said in the affidavit. “He stated you don’t do that until the last day because the opposition would know how many votes they had to make up.”

Simmons added: “My concern was that these ballots were not going to be turned in.”

At another meeting of Ward supporters a few days later, the couple were told that Dowless had begun working for McVicker’s campaign and would no longer be associating with the Ward team.

Ward ended up losing the primary to McVicker by more than 1,700 votes. State records show that McVicker, whose campaign was the target of a subpoena from the state elections board, paid Dowless $1,800 on the day before the primary.

At the time, Dowless was also on the payroll for Harris’ strategists, just two years after Harris’ first primary run against Pittenger failed, in part, because of his trouncing in absentee-by-mail voting. In a race where each of his rivals accrued at least 411 absentee-by-mail votes, Harris had just 195. He lost by 134 votes.

“I’m sure as he was planning his campaign this time, he probably calculated that he needed a strong grassroots showing,” said Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, which supported the insurgent bids by Harris, a longtime pastor, against Pittenger. “As far as I can tell, Mark definitely learned some things as he went through his first two campaigns, but he’s always been a good candidate as far as his appreciation for what’s right and what’s truthful and what’s virtuous.”

Still, Pittenger ran this year’s race with what seemed to be a strengthened hand compared with his 2016 faceoff with Harris. Perhaps most important, the FBI had ended, without charges, an inquiry into the congressman’s business interests. But Pittenger also had other advantages that came with incumbency: money, name recognition and the prestige of power.

About a month before the primary, The Charlotte Observer published a column that barely mentioned Harris and instead gamed out a race between Pittenger and Dan McCready, who became the Democratic nominee.

Pittenger was hardly unaware of the kind of disruption Dowless could potentially unleash in the race, and particularly in Bladen County. During the 2016 election, Pittenger recalled in a statement last week, he met with Dowless, “but quickly ended the meeting over personal concerns with his proposal.”

“We didn’t talk long enough for me to gather detailed information,” said Pittenger, who, through a spokesman, declined further comment. “I just knew I didn’t want to be involved with him.”

Dowless eventually worked for Todd Johnson, who won the absentee-by-mail vote in 2016. And in the next election cycle, Dowless found his way to the Harris campaign, brought on by Red Dome Group, a political consulting firm that served as Harris’ strategists. The extent of Harris’ personal dealings with Dowless are unclear, and in a video released last week, Harris said he was “absolutely unaware of any wrongdoing.”

They were not strangers, however. Harris met with Dowless, according to Pete Givens, then a candidate for Charlotte City Council. Givens said he attended a meeting alongside Harris, whose spokesman did not respond to a message, last year at a furniture store in Elizabethtown, the seat of Bladen County.

Republicans are bracing for the findings of the state elections board, which is expected to meet before Christmas. The evidence presented to the board, and its decision on whether or not to order a new general election, may intensify debate over whether Pittenger should have given public voice to any worries about fraud in the primary.

“Part of what you don’t know is if they just spent a lot of money and had a good operation or whether there’s something funky going on,” Wrenn, the Republican strategist, said of the Harris campaign. “If Pittenger thought there was something funky going on, he should have called for an investigation.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/us/politics/north-carolina-republican-primary-fraud.html" id="409662af-6a5e-3fb3-ab98-c0b8e3f6695e">The New York Times</a>.

ELIZABETHTOWN, N.C. — Democrats have been quick to argue that their losing candidate for Congress in North Carolina’s 9th District may have been a victim of election fraud. But there might be a Republican victim as well.

Fraud Suspected in Loss of Democrat May Have Cost a Republican, Too

In that primary against Pittenger, Harris won 437 of the 456 ballots cast through the mail in Bladen County; his overall margin of victory was only 828 votes. By contrast, in an earlier run against Pittinger in the 2016 primary, Harris won only four of 226 such ballots in the county. Dowless did not work for Harris in that 2016 campaign.

But even if fraud was found in the primary, state officials would be limited in their ability to overturn the Harris-Pittinger outcome given state law and the status of those primary results. The incoming Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives could refuse to seat a winner from the 9th District, leading to a do-over primary and general election, but it is unclear if Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her allies would opt for that.

The potential chicanery in the November balloting, when Harris appeared to prevail over his Democratic rival, Dan McCready, by 905 votes, may lead to a new general election, and delay any resolution to who will next represent the district in Congress.

State investigators, who announced last week that Dowless was “a person of interest” in the inquiry into the general election, have not made any public accusations of wrongdoing in response to allegations that Dowless and his associates violated state law by improperly collecting or completing absentee ballots this fall.

North Carolina Fraud Scandal Casts Shadow Over the Primary, Too

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Alan Blinder and Richard Fausset

Articles written by the author

Like 'Stepping on a Rake': A Wave of Scandals Hits North Carolina Republicans

Fraud Suspected in Loss of Democrat May Have Cost a Republican, Too

North Carolina Fraud Scandal Casts Shadow Over the Primary, Too