Dole, Hagan will meet in historic election

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole appears headed to another historic election this fall.

The North Carolina Republican will face State Sen. Kay Hagan of Greensboro this November marking the first Senate race between two women in North Carolina.

With only partial returns from 34 of the state’s 100 counties reported Tuesday evening, Hagan had 61.3 percent (or 329,897) of the votes cast in the Democratic primary. Jim Neal, a Chapel Hill corporate investment adviser ranked second among five Democratic candidates with 19.96 percent (107,426) of the early votes.

According to the Center for American Women and Politics, there have been only seven other Senate elections in U.S. history where both candidates were women. It has happened only once before in the South, when Louisiana Democrat incumbent Mary Landrieu defeated Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell in the 2002 election.

A heavy favorite in Tuesday’s Republican primary over challenger Pete Di Lauro, a retired New York City police officer, Dole noted the historic nature of her own election six years earlier.

“I was honored to be elected as the first female senator in North Carolina history, and I’m looking forward to running on my record of results and becoming the first female senator to get re-elected from our state,” Dole said Tuesday evening before the polls closed.

Hagan was the only Democratic candidate in the primary to buy TV ads, and the confident candidate focused her primary campaign on Dole.

The other three Democrats on the ballot — Duskin Lassiter, a Lexington trucker; Howard Anthony Staley, a Moncure podiatrist; and Marcus Williams, a Lumberton attorney — entered Tuesday’s primary with little success luring donors or any significant numbers in state polls.