Sen. Kay Hagan voted for Obamacare and says she'd do so again. North Carolina's choice

LENOIR, N.C. — It would be tough to find another state where the political terrain has shifted as dramatically as it has here — from kindling hopes of a Democratic revival in the South just a few years ago, to becoming a conservative hotbed that banned gay marriage, tightened restrictions on abortion clinics and enacted a sweeping voter ID law.

In 2014, voters will have a chance to decide which of those two governing visions they prefer — Barack Obama’s Washington or one-party GOP rule in Raleigh ­ — in one of the most competitive, consequential Senate races in the country.


It will be a choice between Kay Hagan, a rookie Democratic senator who voted for Obamacare and says, however haltingly, that she would do so again, and a conservative challenger — perhaps the figure who shepherded that wish list through the Legislature, Thom Tillis, or other rivals like Mark Harris or Greg Brannon who would go even further.

( PHOTOS: Senators up for election in 2014)

The race underscores the larger challenges facing both parties nationally as they head into the midterms. Democrats are struggling to survive in conservative states as they try to combat Obama’s growing unpopularity and antipathy to the health care law they helped enact. But Republicans are at risk of overreaching with a sharply conservative agenda at a time when their elected leaders are shifting further to the right and independent voters are angry at both parties.

Hagan, who triumphed against longtime Republican Elizabeth Dole to win the seat in 2008, is clearly banking on the hope that voters will punish her opponents for the actions of the GOP-led Legislature and their own hard-right views, whether it’s Tillis’s unapologetic agenda, Harris’s views that being gay is a lifestyle choice or Brannon’s calls to repeal everything from the minimum wage to virtually every gun law.

“This race is not about the president,” Hagan said in an interview, twice refusing to say whether she approves of Obama’s job performance.

But Tillis, a 53-year-old former IBM executive who has the strong backing of the GOP establishment but is by no means the prohibitive front-runner, is betting that Southern Democrats who once thrived here are dying breeds because of the liberal policies coming out of Washington. He is defiant about North Carolina’s hard-right turn, calling it a “reform agenda unlike any other state in the United States.”

( Also on POLITICO: Dem poll: Hagan lead vanishes)

“I think for the most part, what I see from the folks who are opposing our agenda is whining coming from losers,” he said in an interview in his Raleigh office. “They lost, they don’t like it, and they are going to try to do everything they can to, I think, cast doubt on things that I think are wise and that the average citizen when they know what we’re doing, I think, like it.”

With a slate of Republicans representing every corner of the party duking it out for the GOP nomination, Hagan and her party are hoping she’ll be spared despite the problems with Obamacare. Some 473,000 state residents have recently been told their health policies would be canceled after the president and Hagan pledged that people who liked their plans could keep them.

“She appears to be a pawn in the hands of the Obama administration,” Harris, a Baptist pastor from Charlotte, said in an interview at a diner in Kernersville, just west of Greensboro. “Any one of us on our worst day can beat Kay Hagan on her best day.”

( 50 POLITICOs to watch: Thom Tillis)

Acknowledging the problems with Obamacare, Hagan said she’s working on “sensible fixes” and insisted that the outcome of the campaign wouldn’t turn exclusively on the Affordable Care Act. Instead, she pointed to her work on local issues such as contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, opposing tougher regulation of tobacco and providing tuition assistance for military service members.

“I think when you look at this race, what takes place in 2014, it’s about a contrast: It’s about what I’ve done in Washington versus what has taken place in the Republican-controlled Legislature,” Hagan told POLITICO. “They have really been focusing on fringe issues and on policies that work against the middle-class families.”

But when pressed about whether she would back the health care law if she had another chance, Hagan said: “Yeah, I would vote for it again. People have to realize that the cost of health care was getting out of reach for everybody.”

( Also on POLITICO: Paul backs fellow physician Brannon in N.C.)

A survey this week by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling showed Hagan continuing to take a big hit from the barrage of GOP attacks on TV and the bungled health care rollout, leaving her essentially tied with her GOP rivals. Continued problems with the implementation of the law could severely damage her chances next year, polling suggests.

It’s a far cry from 2008, when Hagan beat Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole by 300,000 votes. (Obama, by contrast, won by 14,000 votes, becoming the first Democrat to carry the state since 1976, before losing the state by more than 92,000 votes in 2012.)

Democrats had high hopes after that election, believing the urban mix in Charlotte, Greensboro and the Research Triangle — along with the fact that about a quarter of the state’s voting population is African-American — would help turn the state into a Democratic-leaning battleground, like its neighbor to the north, Virginia. But Democrats have shed more voters here than the GOP — about 102,000, or 3 percent, since 2008 — and independents have grown about 4 percent in that period.

Throughout the country, Blue Dog Democrats in the House have been quashed during the Obama presidency, and Senate Democrats in Southern states beyond North Carolina — like Louisiana and Arkansas — are also at risk of losing next year and helping Republicans regain control of the Senate for the first time since 2006.

To survive, red-state Democrats aren’t promoting their own party’s agenda; they’re trying to make the other guy look worse than them. And Hagan isn’t just running against the GOP Legislature; she’s hoping history will repeat itself and Republicans will make themselves unelectable in a general election by catering to the fringes of their party in primaries.

The GOP field in North Carolina is certainly giving Democrats cause for optimism. The battle for the nomination is looking not unlike recent primary fights that have thwarted GOP attempts to take back the Senate in 2010 and 2012 — this time, with candidates aligned with the tea party, establishment and social conservative wings of the party fighting for supremacy.

Even after presiding over the Legislature’s rightward push, Tillis is viewed by establishment Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Karl Rove — as the most electable in the field.

But his conservative bona fides are already being aggressively challenged by at least four candidates in the May primary, including Bill Flynn, a radio talk show host, and Heather Grant, a nurse practitioner. Two of them — Brannon and Harris, who have never held elected office — are seen as the most likely to make it into a runoff with Tillis, if not defeat him outright.

Brannon, an obstetrician from Cary, N.C., is aggressively courting the tea party wing of the GOP, driving 50,000 miles across the state and attending local tea party events, including one here in Lenoir, a town of fewer than 20,000 located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Speaking to a crowd of about 20 people in a public library, Brannon laid out a detailed case about the limits of the government’s powers under the Constitution. He took shots at Tillis for not doing more as state House speaker to battle the Obama agenda. And Brannon did not mince words about his own party’s leaders in Washington, saying House Speaker John Boehner and McConnell “left us; we didn’t leave them.”

A woman shouted, “Yes!”

Later, in an interview, Brannon said he wanted to fashion himself after leading tea party Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul. The candidate said flatly that he would “vote for someone else” other than McConnell as GOP leader if he wins election next year.

Brannon went on to say that he would eliminate virtually every federal function added after the year 1800 — including activities like food inspection — that he says should be performed by state, not federal, regulators.

Brannon is certainly not afraid to hide his strong views, even if it may alienate middle-of-the-road voters. The Federal Reserve, Brannon believes, is an agency more in line with one of Karl Marx’s planks than with the U.S. Constitution. He doesn’t believe threats of default if the U.S. debt ceiling isn’t raised. He believes Medicare and Social Security should eventually be privatized. And GOP leaders, he argues, should continue trying to defund Obamacare, even if it risks another government shutdown.

Tillis, Brannon says, would fall in line with the “Big Government progressives” who lead the GOP in Washington. And he criticized Tillis for not doing enough to attack Obamacare and the administration’s education initiatives.

“I think Thom has shown he likes the role of government in the hands of the people he likes,” Brannon said, rather than limiting the role of government in people’s lives.

Tillis shot back: “For someone who hasn’t served in office, for someone who hasn’t executed on an agenda, you gotta wonder: Are they really capable of doing it?”

Even though he was endorsed by Paul, the 53-year-old Brannon is fighting the libertarian label, trying to make the case he’s a fierce social conservative, too. He points out he’s a born-again Christian with seven children, and that he fiercely opposes same-sex marriage. Marriage, Brannon told an approving crowd, is a “God-given institution between a man and a woman. End of story.”

Those comments appear partly designed to rebut the 47-year-old Harris, a Baptist pastor from Charlotte who was on the front lines of a successful campaign in the state last year to ban gay marriage. It was that effort that gave Harris a taste of politics and bolstered his appeal among the Christian right. Now he’s arguing that he’s a bridge between the warring wings of the party and that “there’s a need for someone who is a true fiscal conservative and a true social conservative” in the race.

Since his entrance into the race earlier this fall, Harris has picked up backing from members of the party establishment, including former congressman and state party chairman Robin Hayes, and he has the potential to tap into support now flowing to Tillis and Brannon if he can raise the funds.

Despite the rapid national shift in favor of gay marriage, Harris says North Carolina is clearly different.

“I felt like the marriage amendment showed us that when the people of North Carolina were given a clear contrast in values, a clear contrast in direction, that the people of North Carolina were going to make the right decision,” he said.

Asked about his own views of homosexuality, Harris said he believes it is a lifestyle “choice that people make.”

“I take that from a biblical basis, and that is how I always tried to pattern my life and let the Bible be the standard,” said Harris, wearing a “Jesus Lives” pin on the lapel of his jacket.

He called Hagan’s support of gay marriage a “fatal mistake” that voters will remember next year.

Asked about Harris’s comment, the 60-year-old Hagan said: “I think that’s a decision to be made by two individuals.”

Republicans may have good reason to feel bullish about unseating Hagan. Despite Obama dropping some $36 million on the airwaves in North Carolina in the 2012 election, compared with Mitt Romney’s $22 million, and Democrats holding their national convention in Charlotte, the president ended up losing the state.

With a head of steam and massive majorities this year, the GOP-led Legislature rejected state-based health exchanges, blocked an expansion of Medicaid, allowed concealed firearms in restaurants and bars, made it harder for death-row inmates to appeal on racial grounds, imposed new voter identification requirements, cut back on early voting and ended tenure for teachers.

When a brief session convenes next year, it will be in the election season and potentially during a runoff campaign. But if the GOP continues to push an aggressive conservative agenda, it risks turning off independents and riling up the left as it did this year, spawning the Moral Monday protests staged by liberal groups and activists that grabbed headlines in the state and nationwide this year.

But already, Tillis and GOP leaders, including the governor, Pat McCrory, are signaling that they are prepared to raise the pay of teachers, police officers and firefighters during the election-year session. It’s a sign that the state GOP leaders are already preparing an election-year effort to soften their polarizing image.

“I think we’ve learned from some of the policy decisions, and we’ll make adjustments,” Tillis said. “Unlike President Obama and Kay Hagan, when we implement a policy and we need to make adjustments, we’ll come back and do that.”

But, he added: “as the speaker, I do own the agenda. And I’m proud of what we’ve done.”