Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won reelection against Democrat Cal Cunningham in North Carolina’s Senate race.
Cunningham, a former state senator who became embroiled in a sexting scandal late in the campaign, on Tuesday conceded to Tillis after election night tallies and subsequent ballot counting left him more than 2 percentage points behind.
“I just called Senator Tillis to congratulate him on winning re-election to a second term in the U.S. Senate,” Cunningham tweeted.
The race to declare a winner seven days after the general election kept Republican and Democratic lawmakers on edge, as the balance of the Senate still remains in question. With Tillis reelected, the Senate stands at 49-48 in favor of Republicans, with Alaska still outstanding and two Georgia seats that went into runoffs.
The North Carolina Senate campaign this election cycle was close and contentious as Tillis, elected in 2014, started falling far behind Cunningham. Cunningham became embroiled in a sexting scandal with a woman who was not his wife.
Tillis struggled this cycle to gain support from North Carolina Trump voters who were upset about his initial opposition in 2019 to the president’s shifting of federal funding to build a southern border wall. The North Carolina Republican campaigned around the state and touted his support from President Trump. The president, in turn, lauded Tillis, calling him a “great senator, a real friend of mine.”
Cunningham, who initially led Tillis by 6 points during the campaign, went after the GOP lawmaker for his opposition to expanding Medicaid in North Carolina, among other criticisms. But when salacious text messages to Cunningham, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, from a woman married to a military veteran surfaced, the Democrat’s campaign numbers fell, closing the gap between him and Tillis…
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