Tillis Challenger Comes Out Swinging with New TV Ad

RALEIGH – Less than a week after launching his primary campaign to unseat the unpopular, proud RINO U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (NC), Raleigh businessman Garland Tucker is out with a TV ad that highlights why swampy Tillis has to go.

Tillis, too, is pointing to Tucker’s opposition to Trump during the 2016 presidential primary as reason enough to send the incumbent, former N.C. House Speaker back to DC for six more years. And he’s getting his Establishment friends to help him out.

From Politico:

“[…] The first line of attack has been pointing to an op-ed authored by Tucker in 2016, where Tucker wrote that he “stoutly resisted Trump’s nomination” but was supporting Trump in the general election. Tillis’ campaign manager called Tucker an “anti-Trump activist” after he entered the race. On Thursday, Jack Pandol, a spokesman for Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, blasted Tucker as a “charlatan” for claiming he was pro-Trump, and said he was “aiding Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes and is now lying to cover his tracks. […]”

If Tillis’ campaign strategy is getting vocal support from McConnell-linked PACs and the rest of the Swamp, he may be making Tucker’s case for him. With more than a dozen candidates in that 2016 primary field, supporting non-Trump contenders along the way, only to support Trump during the general election, hardly disqualifies Tucker against an incumbent known for thumbing his nose at the Trump base and holding hands with Democrats while in the U.S. Senate.

Still, mere weeks removed from assertively opposing the president’s national emergency declaration on the border (and flip-flopping at the last minute to save face), Tillis is now painting himself as a MAGA Republican.

More from Politico:

“[…] Tillis is cozying up to the president, criticizing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of Donald Trump Jr. “I personally believe Democrats are just trying to keep this thing alive, and it’s their latest launch point to do it,” Tillis told reporters, per The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez and Seung Min Kim. One wrinkle? That subpoena comes from the GOP-controlled Senate, from a committee led by North Carolina’s senior Republican senator, Richard Burr. When that was pointed out to him, Tillis demurred: “l think you’d have to speak to Sen. Burr. I stand by my comment.” […]”

Whoops. Tillis is stumbling to jump aboard the bandwagon after he’s spent a lot of the last several years trying to take its wheels off. It’s impossible that Tillis wasn’t keenly aware that the extension of the Trump/Russia false narrative falls squarely at his fellow senator from North Carolina Richard Burr as far as the Don Jr. subpoena. But true to form, Tillis doesn’t seem to have any problem speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Yet again, another indication that he is every bit the Swamp thing that voters elected Trump to slay.

While the Tucker campaign is already lining up hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads, Tillis already has more than $2 million on hand. He raised more than a million bucks during the first quarter, too, so North Carolinians can expect to see his face on the airwaves impersonating a conservative from now until fall of 2020. However, being so unpopular, we wonder if the more exposure Tillis affords himself, the more voters realize they just don’t like him.

It is worth reiterating that Tillis’ biggest threat is not necessarily Tucker, but himself.