After expensive, brutal ad war, N.C. Senate candidates focus on voters

At the close of the most expensive Senate race in history, Republican challenger Thom Tillis joined his volunteers in county GOP headquarters here in North Carolina’s largest city on the afternoon before election day, making last-minute calls to voters. He mostly got answering machines.

“This is Thom Tillis from the Senate campaign,” he said, leaving a call-back number and cajoling the voter to reach out to friends on email and social media. “It’s going to be 50% turnout. We’re doing everything we can to get out the vote.”

After more than $100 million in combined spending by their own campaigns and outside groups, the race is still virtually a draw, with late polls showing incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan clinging to a 1- or 2-point lead. That means that the campaign, a pivotal race in the national contest for control of the U.S. Senate, will probably turn on which side can mount a more effective get-out-the-vote operation.

Hagan had her own rally-the-troops event Monday in Cary, outside the capital of Raleigh.

“Our ground game is our secret weapon,” she said. “I’ve got 100 locations across North Carolina right now with 10,000 volunteers, hitting the pavement, knocking on doors, reminding people of the difference in this race,” she said.

While a huge share of the outside money has gone for attack ads, some groups are also investing in voter mobilization efforts. A spokeswoman for the progressive CREDO “super PAC,” based in San Francisco, said Monday that its volunteers had knocked on 8,229 doors and made 376,665 phone calls in North Carolina.

After a spate of ad spending blasting Hagan last year, Americans for Prosperity, the conservative nonprofit linked to the billionaire Koch brothers, was putting its energy here into field operations, said state director Don Bryson. “We’re really a grass-roots organization at heart, so we’re pounding the streets,” he said.

Democrats have recently had the advantage in voter mobilization nationally, but Tillis said he was confident the GOP will match their efforts here. He said he ran the effort that resulted in a Republican majority in the state House in 2010. “I consider this election cycle even better,” he said. “That’s why I’m optimistic about our chances of winning.”

It’s important for Tillis to capture a larger share of the vote here in Charlotte, where big Democratic margins helped Hagan unseat Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole in 2008.

One volunteer helping Tillis is 15-year-old Jack Denton of suburban Matthews, who rushed over from his classes at Charlotte Catholic High School to meet Tillis. Denton said he founded a county chapter of Teenage Republicans – “We call ourselves TARs,” he said – and has been energized by his time knocking on doors and passing out conservative voter guides. But he said it’s been hard to muster more than a handful of classmates.

“They have so many other things going on,” he said. “It’s really hard to get them to come out.”

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @JTanfani