By Matthew Langston and Tyler Musialowski
After nine months without a representative in Congress, North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District officially has a new congressman following Tuesday’s do-over election. Republican Dan Bishop won the election by about 4,000 votes, or just over two percentage points, defeating Democrat Dan McCready and two third-party candidates.
Map showing the results of the 9th District election from NCSBE’s website
The race intensified in its final weeks as national attention grew, with both sides spending millions of dollars in support of their candidates. That spending helped make it the second-most expensive special election ever for the House of Representatives.
A number of prominent Republicans also visited North Carolina to help Bishop win, including President Donald Trump. He held two rallies in support of Bishop, including one in Fayetteville on Monday night.
In his victory speech, Bishop said he was “so grateful for the President’s extraordinary support throughout this campaign and especially the closing barnstorm ending with last night’s rally in Fayetteville.”
In addition to the many people he thanked in his speech, Bishop also made several claims. As such, let’s examine some of the final claims made in the election for the 9th District.
The Claims
Bishop said, “We’re not tired of winning… we’re just getting started because we are seeing the successful results of the President’s agenda.”
He then listed off the following as being part of that agenda: “a booming economy with six million new jobs, record low unemployment across every demographic and lower taxes for our job creators and our families.”
It seems Bishop’s claim on job numbers is accurate, though he slightly rounded up the number of new jobs. Since Trump has been in office, the economy has created 5.85 million new jobs.
Bishop’s claim on “record low unemployment across every demographic” also appears to be fairly accurate.
As CNN reported, the most recent job numbers from the Department of Labor placed the unemployment rate for black workers at 5.5 percent in August, which is a drop from the previous month’s rate of 6 percent. The unemployment rate for workers identifying as Hispanic or Latino also fell in August to 4.2 percent.
The August numbers put the national unemployment rate at 3.7 percent. That is fairly close to the lowest unemployment rate in the past 50 years of 3.6 percent, which was set back in May.
It is largely accurate that most corporations and households received tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. That law is more commonly referred to as the Trump tax cuts.
In addition to changing rules for corporations on things like deductions, the Trump tax cuts also reduced the tax rate for corporations to 21 percent from the previous rate of 35 percent.
UNC FactCheck previously wrote about the impact of the Trump tax cuts on tax rates for individuals and families. For individuals and families, the reduction in taxes was more varied and dependant on certain factors, like deductions and what income bracket they fall under.
Table from PolitiFact article about Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Later in the speech, Bishop also touched on the issue of illegal immigration, a topic of much discussion during the race.
“Five hundred dangerous criminal illegals have been let back out on our streets, allowed to prey again on victims,” Bishop said. “That must end, and it must end now.”
A recent story from WBTV said that 489 detainer requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were declined by law enforcement across the state from October 2018 through Aug. 17.
The ICE detainer data does not specify from which counties the undocumented immigrants were released. It is unclear exactly how many of the 489 were from Mecklenburg County, where Sheriff Gary McFadden cancelled the 287(g) program and stopped honoring ICE detainer requests.
Since January, ICE has issued a total of 2,975 detainer requests in North Carolina, meaning that just over 16 percent of requests went unfulfilled.
Bishop’s claim of 500 undocumented inmmigrants being released from North Carolina jails is rounded up from the number of detainer requests that ICE said had been declined by law enforcement. Of those released, there is no data regarding how many became repeat offenders, as Bishop alluded.
Additionally, Bishop said his victory meant that 9th District voters “said no to socialism, no to open borders, no to government takeover of healthcare and no to the Green New Deal.”
As UNC FactCheck has previously explored, these are not stances McCready supported, but Bishop may have been alluding to McCready’s defeat as a beacon of the district’s overall rejection of the national Democratic Party and its values. Bishop’s claim is subjective, since it is not possible to prove one way or another exactly why voters supported the candidate they did.
McCready is a self-proclaimed capitalist and spoke of strengthening the southern border with military-grade surveillance technology that he used as a Marine in Iraq. McCready was falsely accused throughout the campaign of being weak on border security and wanting “open borders.”
He also expressed opposition to the “Medicare-for-All” proposal that would greatly expand the government’s role in health care.
Of the Green New Deal, McCready said, “I believe this is a moral imperative to be protecting the one planet God has given us. That said, I don’t think the Green New Deal is the way to do it.”
The Bishop campaign and other Republican-aligned groups frequently tied McCready to the national Democratic Party in their television advertisements, press releases and social media posts.
