There’s no denying that President Trump was the driving force behind the Republican victories in North Carolina’s special elections Tuesday, spoiling liberal plans to spin the results into a rebuke of his presidency.

The mainstream media tried to turn the special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District into a referendum on the president, portraying the district as a bellwether for how voters in suburban areas might vote in the 2020 presidential election.

By doing so, the media hoped to craft a win-win narrative for the Democrats. Victory would mean that Democrats had flipped a district that candidate Donald Trump won in 2016, while a narrow margin of defeat could be spun as a sign that suburban districts are at least in play for 2020.

REP-ELECT DAN BISHOP CREDITS TRUMP FOR SPECIAL ELECTION WIN IN NORTH CAROLINA RACE

When the results came in showing that Republican Dan Bishop had won by about a two-point margin, the left immediately set about trying to claim victory in defeat. The circumstances surrounding the race, however, suggest a very different takeaway.

Dan Bishop needed help badly. He was hampered from the outset by his party affiliation, for instance, because the whole reason for the special election was alleged voter fraud on the part of the GOP candidate who ran for the seat in 2018.

Bishop’s opponent, meanwhile, was a Marine Corps veteran and political outsider who avoided controversial issues with vague platitudes, positioning himself as a middle-of-the-road moderate. Even so, the Democrats didn’t want to leave anything to chance, outspending Bishop’s campaign by a factor of more than two-to-one.

In fact, the Bishop campaign was down 17 points just three weeks ago, indicating that the district’s historical record of voting for Republican candidates had little relevance in this unique situation.

This is presumably why Democrats and the media chose the 9th District rather than 3rd District congressional special election in North Carolina to use as a litmus test of the president’s re-election chances.

The concurrent special election in the 3rd Congressional District, which Republican Dr. Greg Murphy won handily, took place under much more typical circumstances, with vote shares closely matching the partisan makeup of the district.

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Once President Trump got more closely involved with Bishop’s campaign, however, Bishop’s race quickly began to tighten up, turning it into a statistical dead heat by the time the election rolled around.

Even Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos was forced to admit that the president’s rally in Fayetteville on the night before the election was a decisive factor in putting Bishop over the top, contradicting her party’s narrative about Trump’s supposed electoral weakness.

DEMS ADMIT TRUMP HELPED GOP CANDIDATES SWEEP NORTH CAROLINA SPECIAL ELECTIONS

If the election in the 9th Congressional District was a referendum on President Trump, as the left claimed it was, then the miraculous turnaround in Bishop’s prospects actually indicates that the president’s personal popularity remains the strongest advantage the Republican Party has in the 2020 elections.



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The mainstream media and the Democratic Party establishment clearly thought that the North Carolina special elections would confirm their wishful thinking about President Trump’s electoral appeal. Instead, Dan Bishop’s victory just proved that the president is still as potent a political force as ever.

What should be most distressing of all for the Democrats is the knowledge that President Trump will be able to leverage that popularity to boost Republican candidates all over the country in 2020, just like he did for Dan Bishop in North Carolina.

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