Can Sean Haugh make Senate candidates play nice?

Sean Haugh watched this week's U.S. Senate debate in a bar with the sound down, just the way he liked it.

“I have absolutely no interest whatsoever," he said shortly before Tuesday's debate. "One of the reasons I don't watch it it I already know what they re going to say."

But Thursday night the Durham Libertarian and pizza delivery man will join Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis on the set of Wilmington's WECT studio for the third and probably last Senate debate.

Haugh doesn't plan to get into the personal attacks each of the main party candidates leveled on each other during their first two debates.

"I don’t feel any great need to talk about them" he said. "I think people are already familiar with all the reasons not to vote for them. They've done a good job of that."

In fact he thinks he might help change the tone.

"I hope my presence might help them play nice with each other,” he said.

Haugh has lingered in the single digits in most Senate polls. A USA Today/Suffolk University Poll released Wednesday had him at 4 percent. He had 7 percent in an NBC poll released Sunday.

So he could be a spoiler in what's expected to be a close race. But a spoiler for whom?

Conventional wisdom has been that he would take votes from Tillis. But an Elon University survey suggested just the opposite.

The online survey gave 763 voters a choice of a ballot with all three candidates and one with just Hagan and Tillis. It found that Haugh would siphon twice as many votes from Hagan as from Tillis.

Tillis, the survey directors concluded, "should be thankful that Haugh is on the ballot."
   

 

 

'Machine-Gun Social' candidate is back

It was four years ago that then-Republican Tim D'Annunzio first ran for office with a  controversial, if memorable, run for Congress in the 8th District.

Now the Hoke County businessman is back -- as a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate. He faces a rare Libertarian primary with longtime activist Sean Haugh.

In 2008 D'Annunzio ran for the Republican nomination to take on then-Democratic Rep. Larry Kissell. He first made headlines with a "Machine-Gun Social" fundraiser, with a raffle that offered as a prize an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

D'Annunzio, a self-made millionaire, spent over a half-million dollars on the race. At one point only four Congressional candidates in the country had spent more.

He was far out of the GOP mainstream. On his blog, he called President Barack Obama, Sen. Kay Hagan and other top Democrats "liberal leftist God haters." Strongly anti-abortion, he invoked Hitler in once attacking the president's support of abortion rights. "Obama," he wrote, "will be responsible for killing many more people before he is finished."

He had little love for reporters, whom he described as "demon beasts." During an interview on WBT radio, he told host Keith Larson that "there's a special place in hell for people like you." Larson called D'Annunzio "a delusional, deranged human being," and still the interview continued.

At one point then-GOP chairman Tom Fetzer took the unheard of step of calling D'Annunzio "unfit for public office at any level." He lost to Republican Harold Johnson in a runoff.

In 2011 D'Annunzio led a tea party insurgency against former U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes' bid for state GOP chairman. In 2012, he lost soundly to Democratic Rep. David Price as the GOP nominee in the 4th District.

A former Army paratrooper, D'Annunzio made a fortune making body armor for U.S. troops. In 2010 he was given to marshal language in the campaign and in a blog he called "Christ's War."

That could offer a contrast to Haugh, his Libertarian opponent.

Haugh said he plans to use his campaign "to urge people to turn away from violence as a solution for political or social problems.... So I'll be talking about ending wars both real and metaphorical."