Where’s Ted? The Budd Senate campaign quietly rides on Trump’s endorsement

Republican North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd opened his U.S. Senate bid in April, 2021 with a video of a roaring monster truck rolling over a pile of old cars identified as “the liberal agenda.”

But ever since then, Budd’s campaign has sounded more like an electric car:

He gets around the state, meets with friendly groups and occasionally grants interviews, but he makes little noise or news. It’s an odd approach for a politician former President Donald Trump endorsed by saying, “He will fight like hell. He will fight like nobody fights.”

Budd declined to participate in debates in the Republican Senate primary. His staff says he is still reviewing invitations to debate his Democratic opponent, former state Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley.

“Ted Budd is indeed running a quiet campaign, or at least as quiet as you can be running in a nationally significant race when you’ve got over $6 million to spend,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University who closely follows state races.

Budd’s strategy appears to be to minimize mistakes and exposure in a year when he should be able to ride a Republican tide to victory.

Now in his third term in the House representing the north-central part of the state, Budd is not well known in North Carolina. What people know is that he’s a Republican and he’s endorsed by Trump.

That should be all he needs in a midterm election when Democratic President Joe Biden’s approval rating is at 41 percent. All he should have to do is not squander his advantage by making a debate gaffe or an errant statement in an interview. As Cooper noted, voters “don’t know much about Ted Budd and they don’t know much negative about Ted Budd.”

Former Gov. Pat McCrory, who lost to Budd in the Republican Senate primary, said Budd is avoiding mistakes by avoiding the public. “He’s in hiding,” McCrory told Spectrum News.

The problem is that a campaign based on passively riding a favorable tide gets in trouble when the currents shift. And in the last several months the currents have shifted against Budd and most Republicans.

Budd, the owner of a gun store and shooting range, will get the votes of Second Amendment zealots, but after the mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, selling guns is not a selling point with moderate voters. Budd’s strong pro-life stance wins him favor among conservatives, but the overturning of Roe v. Wade has made that position a liability among some women who might have otherwise supported him and the ruling may bring out more Democratic voters.

Trump’s endorsement is also losing value as the former president’s image is being battered by the Jan. 6 hearings, the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for secret government documents and his taking the Fifth in a deposition related to a New York probe of his business dealings. At this point, Budd might actually have been helped by the cancellation last month of a Greensboro rally with Trump.

Rather than campaigning on his own agenda, Budd has only emphasized how he will “crush the liberal agenda.” He says the “Biden-Beasley agenda” has pushed the U.S. economy into a recession, but that’s hard to square with a $6.5 billion state budget surplus, strong job growth and a low rate of unemployment.

Beasley is open to debates, has visited rural areas outside her bases of urban support and has substantially surpassed Budd in campaign fundraising. Her TV ads cast her as more judicial than partisan.

The combination of events breaking against Budd and Beasley presenting herself as a moderate is working for the Democrat. Polls show the Senate race is tight with just over two months to go.

“Beasley’s poll numbers are better than anybody would have expected,” Cooper said. “She’s neck and neck with Budd in a year that is supposed to be good for Republicans.”

Budd is still favored to win in November. If he loses, it may well be because he never did take the wheel of that monster truck to steer a real campaign of his own. Instead he opted to be towed to November by Trump, who broke down along the way.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com