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He had known, he said, that Republican officials in North Carolina “cheat to draw the district lines.” In fact their gerrymandering was deemed unconstitutional by a panel of federal judges last year and is now being examined by the Supreme Court. But he has learned that on top of that, “They cheat to steal votes. And now they’re sending emails attacking Democrats, saying Democrats forced a new election. It’s like zero moral compass — literally zero. I didn’t expect that.”

President Trump was asked late last month about what went down in the Ninth District, which has led to the indictment of an operative who worked for Harris, Leslie Dowless, on felony charges of obstruction of justice and unlawful possession of absentee ballots. He responded that all fraud was bad and pivoted into his self-pitying, delusional lament about an epidemic of illegal voting by undocumented immigrants. “This didn’t fit the narrative,” McCready said.

What an optimism-straining odyssey he has been on. He belonged to the bevy of military veterans who ran for office for the first time in 2018, and he stood out even among them for his avoidance of divisive issues, his insistence on the possibility of post-partisan consensus, his buoyancy. He’d been a Boy Scout in his teens. A chess champion, too. His dad, a history buff, made him memorize the Gettysburg Address in the seventh grade.

At Duke University, he majored in economics and thought about a career in consulting or finance. But 9-11 had happened when he was a freshman, America was fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan and he was struck by how few of his classmates went into the military. He felt an obligation to serve and “figured if I was going to do it, go all the way.” So he joined the Marines.