Cunningham says devotion to public service is at heart of U.S. Senate run
A decade after his last bid for statewide office in North Carolina, Cal Cunningham got lured back into the political arena by his teenage daughter’s sharp questioning.
“What are you gonna do about it, Dad?” she asked Cunningham one morning after seeing a segment on a cable television news program, he said.
Cunningham, 47, had served as a state senator nearly two decades earlier before two overseas war-zone deployments as a U.S. Army Reservist and a successful job as the general counsel for WasteZero, a Raleigh-based waste management company focused on sustainability.
“We’re running these sustainability programs, but I’m looking around thinking in so many ways, I can’t look my kids in the eye and let them know that the world is OK, that it’s going to be better when they inherit this democracy.
“What can I do to give back? I’m passionate about public service.”
Now the 47-year-old Cunningham, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, is in the final stretch of the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history against incumbent Republican Thom Tillis, a tight contest that could determine which party controls the chamber in January.
The race began and ended with a focus on Cunningham’s character, but for completely different reasons. Early on, his campaign focused on the things that made him an attractive recruit for Democrats hoping to flip a red seat in a purple state: his military pedigree and small-town upbringing. But last-minute revelations about an extramarital affair have upended the race and opened Cunningham up to accusations of dishonesty.
Cunningham points to a lifetime’s worth of service: formative experience, he said, in church and scouting, membership on Gov. Roy Cooper’s crime commission and on the Davidson County community college board, a term in the state Senate and 18 years in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Cunningham, an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church, married his wife Elizabeth in 2000, and the couple have a daughter and a son.
“At each stage in life’s journey, I’ve tried to answer the question: How am I working to leave the world in a better place? How am I serving the people around me? How am I contributing to the public good?” Cunningham said over two lengthy video conference interviews in September.
The interviews took place before reports of sexual text messages, confirmed as authentic by the Cunningham campaign, and marital infidelity by Cunningham became public. Cunningham has apologized for the hurt he’s caused his family, but declined to address specifics about the personal scandal with the media.
“I’ve taken responsibility for the hurt I’ve caused in my personal life. I’ve apologized for it. I’ve said what I’m going to say about it,” Cunningham said on Oct. 7, the last time he has directly answered media questions.
In a campaign already disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, which has limited in-person events, Cunningham has continued to participate in online meetings and voter events but has not taken questions nor held public events with the media present.
The Tillis campaign and outside Republican supporters, who have run through a string of different attacks on Cunningham throughout the campaign, have focused their entire final stretch on his personal misdeeds and lack of transparency. Tillis, who is seeking a second term, said his challenger’s refusal to answer questions about it “makes him unfit to be a public servant at any level.”
“If Cal Cunningham cheats and lies while he asks for your vote, he will continue to cheat and lie as your U.S. Senator,” Tillis said in a statement. “North Carolinians deserve to know the full scope of Cal’s transgressions, and he needs to stop hiding and start providing straight answers.”
But Cunningham, who has continued to lead in public polling throughout the summer and through the beginning of October, has tried to keep the focus on making the case against Tillis, especially on health care.
“I believe, and this campaign knows, that if I continue to hold Thom Tillis accountable for his failures, as we have, and I continue to focus on the issues of the lives of the people in this state,” Cunningham said earlier in October, “we will win this election.”
Shaped by Davidson County
James Calvin Cunningham III grew up in Davidson County, southwest of Greensboro, where the only thing more plentiful than the shale rock essential in brick making are barbecue joints. Cunningham said his experiences growing up there helped shape his outlook.
Cunningham’s uncles owned a brick company, where young Cal and his siblings worked in the summers as teens. His first job was picking up pieces of brick that had fallen off forklifts. Cunningham called it the kind of work where you shower after work and not before.
“It was part of what it meant to grow up a Cunningham,” he said. “It had a pretty profound impact on me to work with folks for whom minimum wage was what they earned. It wasn’t a transition wage.”
The oldest of three children, Cunningham was an avid reader, played baseball and soccer and loved to play the guitar, something he does to this day. He was into classic and Southern rock.
He played in several bands, including The Buzz which played openers at a Winston-Salem spot. While in England, where he earned a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cunningham said he was in another band which recorded an album of covers and original songs.
“The bill for pizza was always higher than what we got paid,” Cunningham said.
Said Catie Cunningham, his younger sister, of his guitar skills: “I don’t know about now, but he used to be amazing.”
She said her brother was a leader back then, with parents willing to let their children go somewhere “if Cal was going.”
His parents, Julee and Calvin, were high school sweethearts and have been married for more than 50 years. They used to run miles together in the morning and they still live in the house that the Cunningham children grew up in, Catie Cunningham said.
His father is an attorney. At 73, he is still working.
“I suspect over his many years as a practicing attorney, he probably represented half of Davidson County,” Cunningham said. “And so I grew up really sort of seeing the fight for justice at a courthouse through the eyes of the neighbors that my dad represented.”
Cunningham followed his father’s career, attending UNC Law School after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was student body president. At 27, Cunningham won a state Senate seat representing his home county. He served one term in 2001-02, during which Democrats passed a tax hike, in part, to preserve education funding while the state was in a recession.
Before the allegations of personal misconduct, the tax increase was a central line of attack as Tillis and his Republican allies tied Cunningham to that vote in negative ads. In the debates, Tillis mentioned the vote as an example of Cunningham going back on a campaign pledge not to raise taxes.
Cunningham, who had signed a pledge to not increase taxes on a questionnaire during the 2000 campaign, has defended the vote, saying it “reaffirmed our commitment to public education in North Carolina.”
“That budget invested in the future of North Carolina,” Cunningham said this summer. “That budget invested in education, health care. It invested in clean air, clean water, farmland preservation. That was the right budget for North Carolina.”
9/11 and military service
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred while Cunningham was in the state Senate and a member of the Navy Reserve. He said he was on active duty for training on Sept. 11, 2001.
A phone call after the attacks from friend Grier Martin, an Army reservist then and now and a state representative from Wake County, convinced Cunningham to switch branches.
“Hey, Cal, the Taliban doesn’t have a Navy,” Martin says he told him. “I can’t believe the guy fell for, ‘Cal, the Taliban doesn’t have a Navy.’”
It took about a year, but Cunningham was officially a member of the Army Reserve in November 2002.
Cunningham served active duty at Fort Bragg in 2005 where he went to airborne school. Needing five parachute jumps to earn his wings, Cunningham injured his ankle on the second try. He healed and four months later redid the jumps, earning a “parachutist badge,” according to his military service records.
Cunningham was deployed to Iraq from Dec. 14, 2007, to Nov. 23, 2008, according to his service records. The U.S. surged troops into the country in 2007.
“Baghdad was on fire. This was the peak of the surge,” Cunningham said in a recent interview. “The whole country and, particularly, Democrats were talking about how to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. I raised my right hand and volunteered to go.”
Cunningham deployed again in 2010, this time for a 14-month stint in Afghanistan. He has earned a number of medals and awards from his military service, including campaign medals for Iraq (two) and Afghanistan and a Bronze Star for “meritorious service” in a war zone.
He is a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps and prosecuted contractors for crimes, including fraud, illegal gun sales, assaults and child pornography, according to a 2009 Winston-Salem Journal story.
“He’s done tougher things in his life than match up against Thom Tillis,” said Martin, who served with Cunningham and deployed overseas himself in 2002. “I knew Cal was up to the task of winning the seat. I knew and know that he would be a really good U.S. Senator. He brings the commitment to public service, the intellectual rigor, the toughness and the passion to be a great U.S. senator.”
Cunningham ran a campaign heavy on that biography, saying he would take on Washington corruption much the way he did in the military. His campaign ads featured photos of him in his military uniform.
“When I joined the Army Reserves, raised my right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, I never thought that one of the greatest threats to our county would be the corruption we’re witnessing in Washington today,” Cunningham said in his first television ad of the campaign in January.
But since the wife of an injured military veteran came forward with allegations of an affair, Republicans have tried to turn that service into a liability, saying Cunningham broke a soldier’s code and putting veterans forward to attack Cunningham as dishonorable and untrustworthy.
“Cal Cunningham violated his oath,” one veteran said in a Tillis television ad.
Cunningham said he would cooperate fully with a U.S. Army Reserve Command investigation into the matter.
‘Health care is on the ballot’
For his part, Cunningham has tried to make the final weeks of the campaign a referendum on health care, especially as the coronavirus pandemic continues with large spikes in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Tillis recently recovered from the virus. More than 4,000 North Carolinians have died from the virus since March.
Throughout the campaign, Cunningham has pushed for the expansion of Medicaid in North Carolina, which is one of 12 states that has not expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act.
Tillis was speaker of the House in the state when lawmakers passed a law making it impossible to expand Medicaid without the legislature’s approval, setting up a years-long battle between Cooper and Republican lawmakers.
Cunningham said he wants to expand the Affordable Care Act and include a public option, but has not backed Medicare for All. The Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett has become a proxy fight over health care, as the court will consider another challenge to the Affordable Care Act shortly after the election.
He has cast Tillis as someone who has voted time and again to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and its popular provisions and someone who is standing in the way of lowering prescription drug prices.
“The election is about the millions of North Carolinians with pre-existing conditions, who could lose their coverage because Thom Tillis will not stop until he’s successful in eliminating the Affordable Care Act, even though he and his party had no plan to replace it. This race is about finally expanding Medicaid in North Carolina which Thom Tillis blocked proudly saying that he made it illegal for the governor to expand that coverage to the hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who could be using it today in the midst of this pandemic,”” Cunningham said on a “Protect Our Care” panel with other Democratic candidates and elected officials.
“While it may be the name Cal Cunningham on the ballot,” Cunningham said, “... really, it’s your health care. That’s what’s on the ballot.”
Tillis said the public option is a “large government-run health care system” that would push people off their private insurance and destroy Medicare.
Tillis repeatedly said Cunningham would be a reliable vote for Democrats in the Senate, especially if the party gains control of the chamber and pushes for far-left programs despite Cunningham’s insistence that he does not back policies such as the Green New Deal, adding justices to the Supreme Court or defunding the police.
“Cunningham’s going to say or do anything to get elected,” Tillis said after the Oct. 1 debate.
Martin, who encouraged Cunningham to run for Senate, said the pair spent a lot of time talking about issues.
“I’m continually impressed with the high-caliber of thought and concern he puts into grappling with an issue. He doesn’t form knee-jerk reactions, he applies a sharp mind looking at evidence on all sides,” Martin said. “He’s got a basis both in fact and an understanding of people.”
Closing messages
Cunningham, who initially planned to run for lieutenant governor, won the backing of national establishment Democrats before his victory in this year’s primary election because of his prodigious fundraising, which has only grown stronger through the general election.
Cunningham raised $28.3 million between June and September, obliterating the North Carolina record for fundraising in a quarter by a Senate candidate. Cunningham had previously set the mark by raising more than $7 million in the second quarter. More than $250 million will be spent in this year’s race.
The fundraising edge and favorable national environment for Democrats, combined with polling showing him in the lead, seemed consistent with a Cunningham victory. The previous two senators to hold the seat — Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democrat Kay Hagan — were defeated after one term.
“Tillis was in a tough spot at the end of September,” Tillis’s pollster Glen Bolger wrote in a Twitter thread about the state of the race in October.
But Republicans feel better about the race now after the allegations of affairs surfaced. A California woman said she and Cunningham had an intimate encounter in Raleigh this summer, and a North Carolina attorney, who indicated on social media that she worked for Cunningham’s unsuccessful 2010 Senate bid, wrote on Facebook that Cunningham engaged in another affair, which led to a report that named a Raleigh woman as having a relationship with Cunningham.
The News & Observer has not been able to confirm the second relationship. Cunningham has not commented on it.
Cunningham’s unfavorable numbers have risen and polls have tightened, but Cunningham remains in the polling lead at a time when more than 2 million North Carolina voters have already cast their ballot either by mail or at in-person early voting.
And with control of the U.S. Senate on the line, Cunningham has tried to elevate the importance of the election.
“If we want to keep our family safe and we want to keep our families healthy, we have to think about this election as our one, and our only, opportunity to course correct for the people of our state,” Cunningham said. “I think all of us can agree that this is, by far, the most important election in our lifetime. The stakes could not be higher.”
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This story was originally published October 25, 2020 at 8:39 AM.
CORRECTION: The name of Cunningham’s mother, Julee, was misspelled in a previous version of this story.
