Former North Carolina congressman Bob Etheridge became one of the Democratic victims of the 2010 Republican tsunami when he narrowly lost to Renee Ellmers, a nurse. Etheridge helped end his political career when he attacked a student holding a camera who asked him a question on a street corner and the video went viral.
But Ellmers was also able to make a strong case that Etheridge wasn’t representing the views of his Raleigh-area district.
Now it is Ellmers who is under attack from the right for losing touch with her constituents. North Carolina primaries require a runoff if no one gets at least 40 percent of the vote, and the odds that Ellmers could face one went up last week with the news that Kay Daly — former communications director for the North Carolina Republican party and noted conservative activist — was challenging her. The congresswoman has a history of weak primary showings, winning only 56 percent in 2012 and 58 percent in 2014. Now she faces Daly and two other challengers in a much more anti-incumbent year in which conservative activists are upset with establishment candidates. The other candidates are former talk-show host Frank Roche and former Chatham County GOP chairman Jim Duncan. Daly has already lined up endorsements from prominent social conservatives James Dobson and Gary Bauer.
Ellmers insists she is both an economic and social conservative, but her rating from the American Conservative Union last year was only 72 percent — the lowest of the nine Republicans in the North Carolina House delegation. Her district has grown more conservative with redistricting and is now rated solidly Republican, so electoral vulnerability is not an explanation. This January, after Ellmers easily won a third term, she was instrumental in forcing the House leadership to pull a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks, even though it contained exceptions such as for rape.
Daly ran a hard-hitting commercial introducing herself to voters during last week’s GOP debate on both CNN and Fox.
She accuses Ellmers of liberal positions on immigration and same-sex marriage and ends with none-too-subtle visual footage of Daly shooting a rifle while going “RINO hunting.” But the commercial’s devastating moment is a clip from a 2011 speech in which the congresswoman said in full:
“In Washington, we don’t have this idea of there are some who are conservative, and then there are others who are more conservative, and you know as a Republican you can be a RINO. None of that matters right now. We can’t keep judging how conservative we are. That is not what we need to be doing.”
Whatever Ellmers meant to say, saying that a Republican can be a Republican In Name Only is not a smart political move for a primary that will be dominated by conservatives.