“It’s fair to say he’s a weakened candidate at this point,” Matthew Ridenhour, a Republican former member of the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners and a potential candidate in any new election, said of Mr. Harris. “I don’t know that he’s too tainted, that he’s too tainted to win, that he’s damaged goods.”

Asked in the television interview if he felt under attack by his own party, Mr. Harris replied, “I certainly don’t feel the circling of the wagons around Harris the way I see the Democrats circling the wagons around McCready.”

He said he had not spoken out until now because his campaign “needed to make sure that everything was done decently and in order.”

Mr. Harris said he hoped his campaign would be exonerated when the facts come out. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “My hope is that McCrae hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Mr. Harris’s allies expect that he would run again if the state orders a new election, but they acknowledge that he would most likely face a challenge from within his own party. Representative Robert M. Pittenger, the Republican incumbent whom Mr. Harris barely beat in a May primary, could run again.

That would set up a particularly dramatic showdown because investigators, in addition to examining the general election, are also looking at whether Mr. Dowless may have run an illegal absentee ballot scheme in Bladen County that helped Mr. Harris defeat Mr. Pittenger in the primary. (Mr. Pittenger has not said whether he would run again.)

Mr. Ridenhour has also emerged as a possible challenger. In an interview on Friday, he said he would consider a bid for the Ninth District seat — but only if Mr. Pittenger declined another campaign.