Can Kay Hagan Survive?

At Politico, "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.

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.”

“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.”

RTWT.