The Republican Party narrowly held onto a North Carolina seat they have held for six decades in a special election on Tuesday night, in a sign of the battle Donald Trump faces with suburban voters next year.
Conservative Republican Dan Bishop won the House seat in North Carolina, beating centrist Democrat Dan McCready by just over two percentage points.
Mr Bishop has tied himself tightly to Mr Trump, who staged an election eve rally for him in the district, leading many to see view the vote as a referendum on the US president’s personal popularity.
Mr Trump was quick to take credit for the victory, saying in a tweet: "Dan Bishop was down 17 points 3 weeks ago. He then asked me for help, we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race. Big rally last night".
No official pre-election polling in the race has been released. However the slim margin will have worried Republicans in an area Mr Trump carried by 11 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election.
Dan Bishop was down 17 points 3 weeks ago. He then asked me for help, we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race. Big Rally last night. Now it looks like he is going to win. @CNN & @MSNBC are moving their big studio equipment and talent out. Stay tuned!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2019
The close result has underscored the rural-urban split between the parties, with Mr Bishop, 55, faring well in outlying areas and Mr McCready cutting into Republican support in suburban areas.
Mr McCready’s moderate platform echoed the success that many Democrats enjoyed in Republican-leaning districts in the 2018 midterms, even with the loss on Tuesday, showed the durability of that approach.
The North Carolina district stretches from Charlotte, one of the nation’s financial nerve centers, through its flourishing eastern suburbs and into less prosperous rural counties along the South Carolina line.
Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in North Carolina, said the narrow margin suggests that the country’s other closely divided swing districts "could be still up for grabs."
Some have cautioned that special elections generally produce a low turnout in voters, meaning they are not necessarily an indicator of future general elections.
However there is speculation that women and university-educated voters living in suburban areas have turned away from Mr Trump because of his conservative social policies and divisive rhetoric on immigration and race. Maintaining their support will be crucial for him to retain swing states like North Carolina.
Reuters
Mr Bishop is a state lawmaker best known for a North Carolina rule dictating which public bathrooms transgender people can use.
The law, which Mr Bishop sponsored, was repealed after it prompted a national outcry and boycotts. The Republican has backed Mr Trump’s push to build a border wall with Mexico and suggested Mr Trump’s critics are intent on "destroying him".
"The voters said no to radical, liberal polices pushed by today’s Democratic Party," Mr Bishop said in a victory speech on Tuesday night.
The new election was called by the state’s board of elections after a Republican consultant was accused of manipulating the November vote by illegally collecting, falsely witnessing and otherwise tampering with absentee ballots.
The Republican candidate at the time, Mark Harris, maintains he was unaware of any alleged fraud in his campaign.
In his concession speech, Mr McCready referred to the ballot fraud investigation that brought about the special election. "The people of North Carolina stood up and we faced down the full force of election fraud and voter suppression," he said.
"When the people in power sought to silence the voices of the voters, stole their ballots, forged signatures from them, filled in vote choices for them.we fought back and we won."
In a separate development, Mr Trump has denied reports that the White House urged a federal agency to repudiate weather forecasters who contradicted the president’s claim that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama.
Mr Trump was responding to a report that his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to publicly criticise its Alabama weather office for stating that Alabama was not at risk.
NOAA released a statement last week saying that National Weather Service forecasters in Alabama, "spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time."
Click Here: camiseta rosario central