The president will be in town Monday to help Republican Dan Bishop's campaign against Democrat Dan McCready.

President Donald Trump’s visit to Fayetteville on Monday to rally for Republican 9th Congressional District candidate Dan Bishop is a signal that the special election that ends Tuesday could have implications far beyond its southern North Carolina boundaries.

Analysts and pundits have speculated the race between Bishop and Democrat Dan McCready (plus the two third-party candidates) will be a harbinger of the president’s prospects as he enters his 2020 re-election campaign.

The terms “bellwether” and “canary in the coal mine” have been applied to it in public commentary.

“The election is serving as a testing ground for Trump’s 2020 message and strategy,” Politico reported last month in an article that said national Republicans were concerned about the race.

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The millions of dollars and other resources that both sides have poured into the district suggest it’s close.

The president’s visit for Bishop shows their allegiance to each other. Bishop previously appeared with Trump at a rally in Greenville. Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, have headlined fundraisers for Bishop, and The Charlotte Observer reports the vice president is scheduled to rally with Bishop in Union County near Charlotte on Monday.

On Friday, Bishop said the Trump rally will boost turnout for him Tuesday.

“We’re surging, and I think the president’s visit will put us over the top,” he said.

Trump is scheduled to appear at 7 p.m. Monday at the Crown Expo Center.

McCready isn’t letting the president’s visit go unanswered. He said Thursday he will campaign in Robeson County just south of Fayetteville, and he is having a Veterans for McCready get-out-the-vote effort in Fayetteville on Monday afternoon.

The 9th District election further draws national attention because of the circumstances behind it. The N.C. State Board of Elections threw out the results of the November 2018 election, in which McCready slightly trailed GOP nominee Mark Harris, and ordered this race to replace it. The elections board concluded the results of the 2018 election were tainted when an operative who worked for Harris in 2018 led a team that committed election fraud with absentee ballots.

The 9th District seat has been vacant since Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger of Charlotte left office at the beginning of this year. Pittenger lost the 2018 primary to Harris.

The district runs along the state line from Charlotte in the western half of the state to Fayetteville and Bladen County in the east. This area has historically favored Republican candidates. Politico said Trump won the district by more than 11 points in 2016. The counties between Democrat-favoring Charlotte and Fayetteville are home to suburban and rural Republican voters plus Republican-voting Democrats.

But Democrats have said since 2016, when District 9’s boundaries were redrawn to where they are today, they could win the 9th District. The party advanced its first serious attempt in the 2018 race when it put up McCready, a solar energy businessman and former Marine from Charlotte.

Bishop, a lawyer and former county commissioner from Charlotte, is a state senator there. He won the Republican nomination in a 10-way primary in May.

The ballot also has Libertarian Jeff Scott of Charlotte and Green Party member Allen Smith of Charlotte. Scott and Allen have frequently traveled and appeared with each other for campaign events.

The off-year nature of the special election combined with its unusual date — election day is in September instead of the more usual November — creates special challenges and unusual dynamics for the candidates, said political scientist Michael Bitzer of Catawba College.

Many voters may not be aware there is an election, he said, and those who have seen the many ads filling the television airwaves in parts of the district may not know if they live in the district.

“This is a campaign that is pretty much ground-focused, meaning you literally have to work the ground at a level that is probably greater than in either a presidential or midterm year,” Bitzer said. There are so many atypical factors at play that “I have no real idea where it’s going to end up, and I daresay nobody knows until the polls close Tuesday night.”

Early voting and absentee balloting started in August. Through Thursday, nearly 68,500 votes had been cast, according to data collected by the Civitas Institute’s VoteTracker project. Democrats led, with nearly 26,900 cast by their registered voters, vs. more than 22,500 Republican voters and nearly 19,000 unaffiliated voters.

Democrats have a higher turnout rate in the early voting, Bizter said, “but you have to remember: Some of those Democrats are older Democrats, and they’re likely Republican voters, they just haven’t switched their party registration.”

The average age of early voters through Thursday was 60, Bitzer said.

The McCready and Bishop campaigns have both had volunteers pushing hard and regularly to get the vote out, according to emails and announcements on social media urging supporters to take part.

Although Bishop is known in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, where he has held elective office for years, he had to introduce himself over the past six months to voters in the district’s seven counties east of Charlotte.

“Given the circumstances, it is a race in which I am coming from behind and people are getting to know me late in the game just because of the short period of time we’ve been in the race, relatively speaking,” Bishop said.

McCready has been running since 2017. He said Thursday he has used his 27 months on the trail to try to appeal to voters across the political spectrum, not just Democrats, and he has held 25 town hall meetings throughout the eight counties.

“I’ve visited churches in rural Cumberland County that told me … no political leader or politician or candidate had ever visited before,” he said. “We’re going places candidates don’t go. We’re going places Democrats don’t go, to be present.”

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3512.