Who is Wiley Nickel, the NC Democrat who beat a Trump-backed candidate for Congress?

On a night when Republicans were expected to gain control of the U.S. House, Wiley Nickel won a hard-fought victory for his party, securing Democrats a crucial pickup that could help ensure that even if the GOP wins a majority, it won’t be as comfortable as they had hoped.

Throughout the campaign, Nickel, 46, and his opponent, 27-year-old political newcomer Bo Hines, stressed how important the toss-up race in the 13th district could be for both parties, as Democrats and Republicans wrestled for the House majority. Political analysts predicted the swing district would hold a slight advantage for Hines, but by the time Tuesday night’s unofficial results were fully reported, Nickel had defeated Hines by just over 7,200 votes.

Now that Nickel is heading to Congress, here’s a look back at his campaign and his tenure in the North Carolina Senate.

Served in state Senate since 2019

A criminal defense attorney who has run his own law firm in Cary since 2011, Nickel previously lived in California, where he unsuccessfully ran for a state Senate seat in 2006.

After moving with his family to North Carolina, Nickel was elected in 2018 to the state Senate from a district covering the fast-growing town and others in Wake County.

During the 2021-2022 legislative session, Nickel sat on the Judiciary; Pensions and Retirement and Aging; and Redistricting and Elections committees, as well as an appropriations committee.

In the Senate, Nickel earned a reputation as a hard-working legislator, according to Jeff Jackson, a fellow state senator from Mecklenburg County who also ran for Congress this year, winning his race in the Charlotte-area 14th district on Tuesday.

“Here’s the thing about Wiley: He never stops working,” Jackson said of Nickel, in an interview with The News & Observer in September. “He’s a machine. Going up against someone like that is a nightmare because you know that anytime you take a break he’s still going. He’s built for a race like this.”

Nickel is also known for accumulating a fairly liberal voting record, which according to the conservative group Civitas Action, is among the most liberal in the Senate Democratic caucus. A ranking of North Carolina lawmakers by Civitas, which assigns a score from zero (liberal) to 100 (conservative), gave Nickel a lifetime score of 14, The N&O previously reported.

While on the campaign trail, Nickel described himself as a moderate — and said he was committed to “changing the tone in Washington” and “reaching across the aisle to deliver results and solve problems.”

Campaigning on inflation and abortion rights

On the campaign trail, Nickel emphasized that his No. 1 issue was the state of the economy, and what steps lawmakers in Washington could take to alleviate some of the financial burdens that people have been facing under levels of inflation not seen since the early 1980s.

“I hear every day how North Carolinians are struggling with rising costs, whether it’s buying food for their families, filling up their tanks, or buying clothes for their kids,” Nickel told supporters and volunteers during a Johnston County campaign event with House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and others, late last month. “Higher prices are cutting deep.”

Nickel also campaigned on defending abortion rights, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the question of abortion legality back to the states.

Republican leaders in the N.C. General Assembly responded to the court’s ruling by expressing a desire to enact further restrictions if they could win a legislative supermajority that would allow them to bypass vetoes from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Throughout his campaign, Nickel held frequent press conferences with local abortion rights advocates to push back against GOP proposals to limit access to the procedure, both at the national level and in Raleigh.

After winning his race Tuesday night, Nickel told The N&O one of the first things he would work on in Congress, if Democrats are able to retain control of both the House and Senate, is to try to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade for abortions into federal law.

Running on compromise and working with GOP

Reflecting on his victory, Nickel said that his opponent, Hines, “ran to the right of Madison Cawthorn” and was too extreme to win in a swing district where voters didn’t decisively lean one way or another.

Nickel said he will go to Washington and aim to work with “the party of Ronald Reagan,” as opposed to the “MAGA-extremist party of Donald Trump.”

Hines, a political newcomer who played football at N.C. State before transferring to Yale, easily won the Republican primary with the support of Trump, who rallied with him in North Carolina on two occasions, once before the primary, and once before the general election.

Supporters of the former president were an important part of Hines’ target coalition of voters, but Nickel said that the result on Tuesday showed that Hines was “out of step” with the district. Earlier in the night, as results were being reported and it looked like Nickel was going to win, he thanked the “diverse coalition of Democrats, Republican and independent voters” who had supported him.

“I ran on compromise,” Nickel later told The N&O. “I ran on working together. I would like to reach out to Republicans and work with them and for them to represent every single person in this district.”

Danielle Battaglia and Chantal Allam contributed.

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