After Berger-Page primary, a county GOP considers call to oust NC party official
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- Lee County GOP will consider resolution asking state chair to remove Shaheen
- Resolution urges state chair Jason Simmons to oust Shaheen if passed.
- Shaheen holds finance roles for state party and PAC, raising claims from local GOP
In a bruising primary that may have unseated the state’s most powerful lawmaker, campaign spending is causing blowback in one county Republican Party organization.
Members of the Lee County Republican Party on Saturday will consider a resolution calling to remove the North Carolina GOP’s finance chairman amid neutrality concerns.
Larry Shaheen serves in finance roles for both the NC GOP and a political action committee called “NC True Conservatives,” which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Senate leader Phil Berger and oppose his challenger, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page. All told, the PAC spent $2.8 million on mailers and advertising, according to one election watchdog’s analysis.
Page leads Berger by 23 votes as recounts and challenges continue.
Jim Womack, the chairman of the Lee County GOP, told The News & Observer that Shaheen’s role as the key fundraiser for the state party and as the PAC’s treasurer is “a direct and unmistakable conflict of interest.”
“If Mr. Shaheen was a conscientious Republican interested in observing party rules ... and trying to cast the party in the best light, he would resign immediately,” Womack said.
Shaheen said Womack is misunderstanding the role of finance chairman, which works to assist the party’s finance director in fundraising and “bring other people in to donate to the party.”
A spokesperson for the state GOP responded to an inquiry about the resolution with a statement that said the party was committed to defeating Democrats in November.
Campaign finance
Womack ran unsuccessfully to be the state’s party leader in 2017 and 2019. His wife, Sherry Womack, ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary this year for a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives.
Jim Womack said the North Carolina GOP is a hierarchy, and that countywide party organizations are also impacted by state officers.
“He’s willfully put himself in a position of a direct financial conflict of interest so he can leverage all the donor information he has from the state GOP to benefit himself personally, financially and politically,” Womack said. “That’s just inappropriate.”
Shaheen said he has never had access to donor records or histories.
“I think that any Republican in Lee County who understands that, as a volunteer, we all privately support individuals in races, [and] would find it somewhat hypocritical that Mr. Womack, as the chair of his own party, supported his wife openly in her primary, while I am apparently not afforded the same opportunity for a champion of our North Carolina Republican Party in Senator Phil Berger,” he said.
Womack also donated $750 to Page’s campaign.
Womack said he anticipates between 50 and 60 voting members to attend the organization’s convention, and said he is “pretty confident” the resolution will pass.
He said other counties may be taking up similar resolutions through conventions or executive committees. Some county parties have already had their conventions.
A copy of the resolution calls on state party chairman Jason Simmons to remove Shaheen from his position.
