Trump-backed Ted Budd wins GOP Senate primary in North Carolina, NBC News projects

Rep. Ted Budd, RN.C., won North Carolina’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating former Gov. Pat McCrory and former US Rep. Mark Walker, NBC News projected.

Just after 8 pm ET, Budd held a lead of roughly 30 points over McCrory. His victory for him sets up a fall battle with Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley, the former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Budd was locked in a tight race with McCrory for months but was able to turn the race into less of nail-biter with just weeks to go thanks mostly to two friends who recently became enemies — former President Donald Trump and the Club for Growth, a conservative economics group spending millions in Republican primaries.

Both Trump and the Club for Growth announced their support for Budd last year. In fact, Budd was one of Trump’s earliest endorsements of the entire cycle. But Budd did not start building a lead in the polls until the final weeks of the race.

His surge began near Trump’s April rally and as the Club for Growth ratcheted up its anti-McCrory spending.

Through its Club for Growth Action Super PAC, the Club for Growth spent more than $11.2 million on ads backing Budd through last week, according to AdImpact. No other candidate or group came close to matching the Club for Growth’s spending, as Budd, McCrory and Walker spent roughly $3 million between them on ads through last week, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.

Carter Wren, a North Carolina GOP strategist, told NBC News the Club for Growth’s massive spending on the race is what helped lock up a victory for Budd.

“I think it’s all about money,” he said, adding, “That sounds too simple to be true. But, you know, you’re talking about a statewide race where you’ve got to talk to a million primary voters.”

McCrory, who was once the mayor of Charlotte, gained national notoriety in 2016 when he signed North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which mandated that people use bathrooms in public facilities that complied with their gender assigned at birth. The state faced immense backlash from businesses, which pulled investments and events out of North Carolina in response.

That backlash contributed to his slim defeat in his re-election against sitting Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, and portions of the law were subsequently repealed.

Budd had a lower profile entering the race. A member of the House Freedom Caucus, he objected to the 2020 presidential election results after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In early March, as the war in Ukraine raged, McCrory accused Budd of casting votes “ friendly” to Russia.

That month, the Budd campaign’s internal polling showed McCrory with a 6-point lead. The race soon took a turn. From April on, surveys showed Budd with leads of more than 24 and 27 points.

“That’s a big lead,” Trump said at a rally for Budd last month. “I saw one where he is 10 points, one where he’s 12 points and one where he’s 17 points up over the bathroom governor. You know the bathroom governor. Remember the bathroom governor? What a mess that was.”

A Meredith College survey from earlier this month suggested Budd had a slimmer 7-point edge and showed the congressman running strongest “with the most conservative Republican voters” while McCrory held an edge with self-identified moderate and urban Republicans.

Jonathan Felts, a senior adviser for the Budd campaign, said that the Trump endorsement helped initially with fundraising and grassroots activists asking to help. But last month’s rally “was when the dam broke.”

“Anyone who had been kind of playing coy, kind of sitting on the sidelines, it was like time to get off the sidelines to kind of pick a side,” he said.

But just as Trump and the Club for Growth seemed to shore up Budd’s support, their relationship with each other sourced over the group continuing to back Josh Mandel in Ohio’s GOP primary Senate after Trump announced his support for eventual winner JD Vance. Since then, the Club for Growth announced it was backing Kathy Barnette in Pennsylvania’s Senate primary — a direct rebuke of Trump’s pick, Mehmet Oz.

Jordan Shaw, a McCrory adviser, said “no one” expected an outside group to spend as much on the primary as Club for Growth Action did, which pummeled McCrory with ads claiming he was a liberal Republican in Name Only, or RINO, and a supporter of sanctuary cities.

Shaw took a particular issue with the sanctuary cities ad, which he deemed “a total lie,” pointing to McCrory having signed a bill prohibiting cities and counties from enacting sanctuary policies.

“When you have a group who has unlimited resources and is unencumbered by the bonds of truth, that can have a pretty powerful impact on a race,” Shaw said, adding, “They spend more than everybody else combined. And they have no problem lying to Republican voters to achieve their ends.”

David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, declined an earlier interview through a spokesperson but said in a statement that “North Carolina primary voters want a principled conservative like Ted Budd as opposed to a failed RINO like Pat McCrory.”

In a statement following Budd’s win, McIntosh said the group was “proud to have played a role in helping Rep. Ted Budd secure the nomination.”

Michele Woodhouse, a former GOP district chairwoman who is now running in a primary against Rep. Madison Cawthorn, RN.C., said another big turning point for Budd in the primary was winning Robinson’s endorsement. The lieutenant governor is “incredibly popular” with grassroots conservatives in the state, she said.

“What has changed in the course of the last few weeks was that President Trump came into town,” she said. “And Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson got up on the stage and endorsed Ted.”