Mary Ellen Klas: Thom Tillis knew what the GOP refused to hear

On Tuesday, Republican Senator Thom Tillis became one of only three GOP senators to cast a vote against President Donald Trump’s budget bill. Ultimately, his vote was mostly symbolic — the measure passed on a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaker.

But the vote has already had consequences for the two-term lawmaker from North Carolina. On Sunday, he made the announcement that he would not be running for re-election in 2026. His decision came a day after he took to the Senate floor to declare that he couldn’t support the bill because “it would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”

Tillis’ retirement not only raises the stakes for what was already expected to be one of the most closely contested 2026 races for the U.S. Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage, it could also topple political dominoes for congressional and state legislative races in a state almost evenly divided between Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters.

If Tillis had sought re-election “he probably could not campaign at Republican events without a legitimate fear of being beaten off stage,” Jonathan Felts, a North Carolina Republican consultant and Tillis supporter, told me. “The reality is, if we start with a clean slate, we’ll have a better chance of winning.”

Tillis is hardly a moderate. He is a conservative, veteran lawmaker who understands details and frequently speaks his mind. He not only knows how to build a consensus but also finds the value in it. He is exactly the kind of lawmaker the nation needs more of if we are to resolve our festering challenges.

But because of Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party, independent thinkers like Tillis are reviled, not rewarded. How that plays out in the 2026 elections, especially in North Carolina, will be must-see TV.

The midterms are traditionally a fraught time for the party that holds the White House and the line-up of potential candidates to replace Tillis reflects those tensions.

Republicans are suggesting that Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump is a likely prospect. She grew up in Wilmington, attended North Carolina State University and served as co-chair of the Republican National Committee last year, along with another North Carolinian, Michael Whatley. But she now lives in Florida and currently anchors a weekly Fox News show.

“If Lara Trump enters, I think she clears the primary field,” said Christopher Cooper, political science professor at Western Carolina University. “Everybody else is going to want Donald Trump's endorsement and clearly he's going to give his endorsement to the person who shares his last name.”

But while Trump may be overwhelmingly popular among Republican primary voters, polls show his tariff and immigration policies, and the proposed Medicaid cuts, are increasingly unpopular among general-election voters.

That makes Lara Trump “a dream for Democrats … because she will not be able to separate herself from Donald Trump and all the things he just did,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, in an interview on MSNBC on Monday.

Democrats are urging former Governor Roy Cooper to jump into the race. He had been rumored to be considering challenging Tillis before the senator announced his exit this week, but the 67-year-old former governor and state attorney general has been taking his time deciding.

Cooper won statewide all three times Trump won the state. He left office with high approval ratings and, if he’s at the top of the ticket, he could help Democrats down the ballot, including one of the most competitive congressional seats in the nation, North Carolina’s First District now held by Democrat Don Davis.

“Roy Cooper can do a lot of good for his party if he runs,” Chris Cooper (no relation) of WCU told me. “But everyone is wondering where his heart is right now.”

Other Republican names emerging are Whatley and freshman Representative Pat Harrigan, a West Point graduate and former Green Beret. Former Representative Wiley Nickel launched a bid for the Democratic nomination three months ago.

The essence of Tillis’ warning to his party is that Trump and the MAGA wing were once again overplaying their hand.

That’s what happened in 2024, when North Carolina Republicans nominated Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson on the strength of Trump’s endorsement, despite Robinson’s sketchy history of hateful, racist and misogynistic remarks. Robinson was crushed by Democrat Josh Stein, as were other Republicans running for statewide office, even though Trump won the state.

Tillis had earned a reputation in Congress as someone willing to work across the aisle — but the Republican Party of North Carolina censured him for it. They didn’t like that he was a key negotiator of the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law. They chastised him for highlighting the flaws in Trump’s immigration policies in his first term, and for supporting funds for red flag laws, which allow courts to authorize the removal of firearms from people undergoing a diagnosed mental health crisis.

Tillis announced he wouldn’t vote for the $930 billion in Medicaid cuts in the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill because it would “betray the very promise Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office” that the bill would “not touch Medicaid.”

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the cuts to Medicaid will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health insurance over 10 years, either from the loss of Medicaid or from coverage losses in the Affordable Care Act, and as many as 300 rural hospitals could close.

As a former speaker of the House in the North Carolina Legislature, Tillis had done his homework. He knew that if he voted for the bill, he would be either leaving thousands of working people without health insurance or asking the conservative state Legislature to fill the massive budget gap.

“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore?” Tillis asked on the Senate floor.

In his statement on Sunday, Tillis blamed both parties for stifling compromise and middle ground and pointed to the recent departures of conservative-leaning Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“They got things done,” Tillis said. “Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don't give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail.”

Tillis’ impending departure is a signal that he doesn’t believe his party is capable of correcting course. Sadly, it appears he may be right.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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