NC-08: Republican Mark Harris, whose campaign was responsible for one the most ignominious election fraud scandals in recent memory, announced on Tuesday that he's waging a comeback bid for North Carolina's open 8th Congressional District.
Harris, an ultra-conservative pastor, managed to oust Rep. Robert Pittenger in the 2018 primary for the old 9th District, but despite the area's conservative lean, he faced a strong challenge in the general election from Marine veteran Dan McCready. It appeared that Harris managed to survive that year's blue wave by fewer than a thousand votes, but in a shocking development, the state's bipartisan Board of Elections unanimously refused to certify the results amid allegations of fraud.
In the following weeks, it emerged that McCrae Dowless, a consultant for Pittenger, had run a scheme to illegally collect blank or incomplete absentee ballots in rural Black counties (North Carolina prohibits third-party ballot collection), then filled them out and returned them to election offices with forged signatures. With the number of potentially tainted ballots far larger than Harris' ostensible margin of victory, the elections board eventually threw out the results of the race and ordered a do-over election. Dowless, along with half a dozen co-conspirators, was later indicted on a variety of felony counts but died last year while awaiting trial.
Harris, by contrast, was never charged with wrongdoing, but his fellow Republicans knew he was toxic. The GOP-run legislature quickly passed a bill changing state law to allow for a new primary rather than require the same candidates for both parties to run again. That allowed Republicans to replace Harris with state Sen. Dan Bishop, the author of North Carolina's notorious "bathroom bill," who defeated McCready by a tight 51-49 margin in a special election held 10 months after the original contest. Republicans, in other words, paid no electoral price for the fraudulent scheme designed to benefit their party.
And now that Bishop is running for state attorney general, Harris has the chance for a do-over of his own. But he doesn't seem to want to let the past remain there: In a statement accompanying his kickoff, he claimed to be a victim of a "manufactured scandal" perpetrated by Democrats and even re-hired the same campaign manager from his 2018 effort. He also seems aware that some Republicans may not be so happy to see him again, saying he "fully expects a flurry of lies and rumors from both Democrats and some from my own party."
As of now, though, he's the only candidate in the race. And with Republicans slated to re-gerrymander North Carolina's map, if he wins next year's primary, he's exceedingly likely to finally make it to Congress after all.