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Pat Harrigan had just called for questions at a meet-and-greet in a paneled back room at Boxcar Grille in Claremont, a highlands city of fewer than 2,000, when a hand shot up.
Harrigan, 36, a former Green Beret and now a Republican candidate for Congress in the 10th District, had spent 20 minutes making his case before 50 friends, supporters, and undecided voters tucking away chicken and country-fried steak.
His promised priorities were other staples of conservative Catawba County: Protect our nation by securing the border and ensuring public safety. Unleash the economy by lowering taxes and spending. Restore government integrity and parental rights.
“You’re saying all the right things,” the questioner said. But so did Ted Budd and so did Thom Tillis, the state’s two Republican senators. And so did everybody else we’ve sent to Washington, he said. And nothing gets done.
“The machine is so powerful,” the man said. “So that’s my question to you: How are you going to build up a force field, so you don’t get absorbed by the machine? Because it’s going to happen.”
If such a vortex for the elected truly exists, the primary’s other top candidate, Grey Mills Jr. of Mooresville, has lived to tell about it. Mills has served four terms in the General Assembly, interrupted after a failed run for lieutenant governor in 2012, and he’ll happily brandish his legislative record.
Mills also boasts of lifelong roots in the 10th District, now in its sixth iteration since 2013. It spans five counties from the very Republican exurbs of Charlotte to the heart of Winston-Salem, artfully carved by the legislature last fall as one of 10 solid GOP districts among the state’s 14. So after the March 5 primary, one of these two men will essentially be a congressman-elect.
The voter’s question in Claremont sums up the challenge for the candidates, and Harrigan had a ready answer. He’ll keep from being co-opted, he said, by regularly checking his private statement of positions, by systematically listening to voters, and by continuing to consult his pastor, who gives Harrigan’s biblical worldview a fortnightly checkup over lunch.
Harrigan perhaps was sensing the mood in the new 10th. The most engaged conservative voters here want fidelity, and they want a fight.
The Cross and the Flag
From a hill on westbound U.S. 70, as you descend toward the U.S. 321 interchange in southwest Hickory, you’ll see two structures poking above the treetops on either side of the road.
To your right, an 800-square-foot American flag hangs heavily on an 80-foot-tall pole above Randy Marion Sav-A-Lot, one of 18 dealerships in the Randy Marion Automotive Group. Mills is corporate officer and attorney for the company, which was founded by his father-in-law.
On a knoll across the six-lane road, a buttressed white cross rises from the courtyard of Hickory Bible Church, where a former conference center is now a base to evangelize “God’s inerrant, sufficient, and authoritative Word.” It’s where Harrigan worships with his family.
The cross and the flag are the sentinels of the 10th District, where God and country dominate souls and terrain. Both candidates proclaim deep faith. Both are businessmen. But Mills touts his seat at the tables where work gets done. Harrigan wants to walk in and flip some tables over.
Mills, on his campaign’s X (formerly known as Twitter) account: “Our long list of legislative victories proves that when you stand by our principles and stick up for the things that matter, you can accomplish great things.”
Harrigan, in Claremont: “If we don’t change the way that things are right now, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity to the next … We have failed outcomes, everywhere. We have failed leadership, everywhere.”
To succeed the popular Patrick McHenry, who is not running for an 11th term, they must win a sprint. They’re already halfway through a primary season of less than 12 weeks, from the filing deadline to Super Tuesday in the first week of March.
A runoff is mathematically unlikely; a Democratic win in November even less so. Residents of the new 10th District have voted Republican by an average margin of 16 percentage points in federal and gubernatorial races since 2020, according to an analysis by Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer.
Democrat Ralph Scott Jr. of Statesville and Libertarian Steven Feldman of Winston-Salem are unopposed in their primaries.
On the GOP side, Mills and Harrigan are joined by Diana Jimison of Hickory, who got 110 votes as a write-in candidate in the 10th in 2022, and by candidates in their first attempts at major office—solar-energy consultant Charles Eller of Davidson and Brooke McGowan of Troutman, who has worked as a business manager and clinic director.
Betrayed by the System
I recently toured the 10th District, which comprises Lincoln, Catawba, Iredell, and Yadkin counties and most of Forsyth, visiting 12 towns over three days and chatting with three dozen voters. Aside from the spiritual and the patriotic, I heard a few other themes.
One was economic anxiety, in an area that’s actually doing relatively well. None of these five counties is among the 40 most distressed in the state Department of Commerce’s designation, and Lincoln and Iredell are among the 20 healthiest.
There’s also apathy. More than half of the people I met were unaware of the campaign or uninterested; a few said they had tuned out national and state politics altogether.
“We have failed outcomes, everywhere. We have failed leadership, everywhere.”
Pat Harrigan
But there’s also a well of contempt—from folks who feel ignored or even punished by the system and betrayed by those they trusted to fix it, from both parties.
“It’s all about money. You gotta go along to get along,” said Harrigan’s questioner after the Claremont event, a former plastics worker in his 50s who lives in southwest Catawba and would identify himself only as Chris.
In the restaurant parking lot, he said he was undecided about the candidates but “cautiously optimistic” about Harrigan, but “the first thing he’s going to get is inundated by a ton of lobbyists. They are immediately going to say, ‘Look, unless you go along, we’re going to primary you. And we have millions and millions of dollars.’ Look at Tillis. When Tillis got in … he turned out to be a super liberal.”
Donald Sellers of Lincolnton, a hardcore conservative and retired Army veteran, was also in a derisive mood as he finished his regular breakfast at City Lunch downtown. He cursed Tillis and added: “He’s part of the game. He’s been bought off … There are only a few Republicans I trust.”
Tillis’ office declined to respond. He has worked with Democrats on several issues, including gun legislation, infrastructure, immigration, and NATO expansion.
Bitzer has inspected this phenomenon among voters, which was manifest in the Tea Party movement in 2010 and Donald Trump’s election as president six years later.
“This is not your average voter,” Bitzer said. “This is a highly engaged voter.”
Any political party is “kind of a triangle,” he said. “You’ve got the base voters; you’ve got the activists; you’ve got the elected officials and candidates.” The base and the activists in the GOP now “are Trump loyalists, and really the last corner of the triangle to be merged with the other two are the elected officials. And this is where the voters, and particularly the activists, are coming to assert their power.”
Conservative Turf
Harrigan wants to be the tip of their spear. “I think voters want a fighter right now because they see nothing but chaos,” he told The Assembly. “And as a military veteran, a Special Forces veteran at that, I understand how to fight.”
This is Harrigan’s second campaign. His first was what GOP strategist Wayne King of Cleveland County calls a “Hail Mary,” as the 2022 Republican nominee in the 14th District, the Charlotte-based district that leaned left. He lost to Democrat Jeff Jackson by 15 points.
But now he’s on conservative turf. He pitches himself as a family man, and he and his wife named their daughters Reagan and McKinley, now 6 and 4, after GOP icons. He says he’s running for them, and “for all of y’all’s kids and grandkids.”
He grew up in California and Wyoming, graduated from West Point with a degree in nuclear engineering, commanded an Army platoon in Alaska and then a combat outpost in Afghanistan, volunteered for the Special Forces and moved to Fort Liberty (previously called Fort Bragg), and did more duty in Afghanistan.
Before he left the Army, he and his wife started a firearms business in their double-wide trailer outside Fayetteville. Their business is now based in Burke County, employs about 55 people, and makes handguns, semi-automatic rifles, and associated equipment.
Mills, 57, grew up in Iredell County, graduated from Appalachian State University in 1990, and earned a degree from Regent University School of Law, a private Christian school in Virginia Beach, in 1994. He has been a teacher, assistant district attorney and private lawyer as well as his leadership job with the auto group. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three adult children.
Mills was a precinct and county chair for the GOP before winning terms in the state House in 2008 and 2010. District 95 voters returned him to the House in 2020 and 2022.
His campaign pitches online are peppered with the words “proud” and “continue.”
Mills “had a quiet but consistently conservative voting record in the General Assembly, is clearly moneyed and connected to money, and connected to the traditional power structure in Republican politics in North Carolina,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University.
Perhaps his proudest achievement is SB 747, an election bill that passed last session. It banned the acceptance of absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, gave more power to poll observers, and changed several other voting procedures. Mills led its passage as chairman of the House Election Law and Campaign Finance Reform Committee. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it, saying it would make voting harder for students, young people, and people of color. The legislature overrode his veto.
“We passed legislation to ENHANCE the security of our elections, and I will continue the fight as your Congressman,” Mills tweeted on January 7.
Faith in the Foothills
Harrigan and Mills have few significant differences on issues. Harrigan talked about his positions in a wide-ranging interview; Mills did not respond to interview requests made to his campaign and legislative offices, and his positions here are drawn from his online and social posts.
First and foremost, faith moves these foothills. While a growing number of Americans say they are not affiliated with any religion—27 percent in a Public Religion Research Institute survey in 2022—that number is much lower in the 10th, from 21 percent in Forsyth to just 14 percent in Yadkin in the latest estimates. Surely in this area, “the majority of Republican primary voters are regular church attenders,” said King, the GOP strategist.
But faith’s political role has changed here, said Kim Hutchens, who was a top congressional aide for years to James T. Broyhill, an area stalwart in politics and the furniture business. Broyhill served the 10th District in Congress for 17 years until 1986, when he served four months as a senator after John East died in office.
Broyhill was a man of quiet faith, Hutchens recalled. For area voters in those years, he said, “assessing a candidate’s faith was clearly a demonstration of the way they lived their daily lives.” But now politicians are “compelled to wear their Christian faith on their sleeve.”
“Our long list of legislative victories proves that when you stand by our principles and stick up for the things that matter, you can accomplish great things.”
Grey Mills Jr.
King, who has been a congressional aide and candidate and vice chair of the state party, talked about why that’s true. Enlisting the faithful is now “vital to getting your message out,” he said, “to being sure that you connect with people.” But “you have to be very authentic.”
By all accounts, Mills and Harrigan are. Harrigan said the country needs “principled leaders of character” who “follow that narrow path.”
Asked about religion’s role in government, he said, “I don’t think that you can divorce one from the other.
“We owe a duty and loyalty to the Constitution … that everybody gets a fair shot, and regardless of what they believe. But I don’t think that those fundamental tenets require me to abandon my faith in the performance of duties as a representative in Congress.”
Like Harrigan, Mills and his family also are members of a conservative church—Trinity Baptist in Mooresville—where the senior pastor is Mark Harris, a Donald Trump-aligned firebrand who’s making another run for Congress, in the 8th District. It’s also where GOP Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is running for governor, gave a fiery guest sermon last March, saying churches that fly the rainbow flag “spit in the face of God.”
A Sprint to March 5
Harrigan and Mills would make securing the southern border a top priority. Both support expanding parental will in education. On gun rights, they’re both staunch defenders of the gun-rights view of the Second Amendment, and the NRA gave both a score of 92 percent in 2022. Both support Trump for president.
Both continue to push election changes. Harrigan favors tighter restrictions on the types of identification that voters can use, such as student IDs. When asked about the 2020 election, Harrigan said, “I do believe Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. To the extent that fraud played a role, I don’t think anybody can formally determine.”
Harrigan, who’s never held elected office, could have the better hand among indignant voters, but Mills can play the native card. Harrigan’s primary residence is now in Hickory, and he points out that his daughters “have always gone to school” there. But he started this campaign running in the 14th District and made allegations of corruption against state House Speaker Tim Moore, who is running there. He switched to the 10th after McHenry announced on December 5 that he would not run again.
“A lot of the donor community does have some heartburn with the way he attacked the speaker,” King said, and the district switch “looks very opportunistic. I think voters are getting a little tired of that.”
A short campaign is also an “incumbency protection plan,” King said, because name recognition is hard to overcome quickly. The 10th has no incumbent, but Mills is well known in Iredell County, where one-fourth of the district’s residents live.
As for money and resources, “Harrigan has been able to run essentially a permanent campaign” since 2022, Cooper said. Harrigan raised $255,265 in the first nine months of 2023, loaned his campaign $500,000 and had $744,965 on hand at the end of September, according to his third-quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission. Filings for the fourth quarter, which will be the first for Mills, are due January 31.
Harrigan has the endorsement of Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative/libertarian super PAC aligned with the Koch brothers that assists its favorites with voter appeals by phone, mail, and direct contact. He also has the blessing of Robinson—and that could matter to GOP voters, King said.
Mills has the power of allies in the legislature. Moore, who did not respond to a request to discuss this race, has called him a “very close personal friend.” And “for the folks who write checks … yeah, Tim Moore’s a factor,” Cooper said. U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, a 10-term Republican who represents the 5th District, which borders Virginia, has endorsed Mills.
Neither candidate yet has the biggest prize—Trump’s endorsement. Club for Growth’s political action committee, which supports conservative economic policies and brings huge resources, also has not weighed in.
And the 36 percent of the district’s electorate that is unaffiliated “will absolutely be a factor,” Cooper said. Unaffiliated voters, who can vote in the party primary of their choice, usually choose the most competitive primary, so Harrigan and Mills will need to appeal to them.
But aside from all of that, in a district where one party rules, the candidates’ positions are consonant, the season is so short, and the voters are restless—the race may just go to the swiftest. Or the feistiest.
Eric Frederick was a reporter, editor, and audience strategist at The News & Observer for more than three decades. He’s now an editorial adviser at EducationNC, which does reporting and policy analysis on public education, and a freelance writer.