Mark Harris Is Not Asking For Forgiveness

In late 2018 and early 2019, Mark Harris was an almost-congressman from North Carolina.

Harris had walked away from pastoring his Charlotte megachurch to pursue a dream of serving in the U.S. House. He knocked off an incumbent in the GOP primary, and then appeared to beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by 905 votes out of more than 275,000 cast. 

Harris even showed up on Capitol Hill soon after the election to attend House freshman orientation, get an office assignment, and pick out paint colors.

But back in North Carolina, there was “a huge scandal brewing,” in the words of TV talk show host Stephen Colbert, riffing on what soon became national news: The N.C. Board of Elections refused to certify the results in Harris’ race because it was investigating absentee-ballot fraud. 

Political operative McCrae Dowless of Bladen County, who was paid $131,375 by the Harris campaign, allegedly orchestrated the collecting, tampering, and forging of ballots.

On February 21, 2019, the silver-haired Harris, wearing a dark suit and an American flag lapel pin, took the witness stand in Raleigh on day four of the state board’s evidentiary hearing. 

He denied any knowledge of the illegal doings by Dowless, a convicted felon whom Harris had personally hired despite warnings from Harris’ own son. John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney, had previously offered dramatic testimony about cautioning his father.

As Mark Harris was being questioned, his attorney stopped the proceedings. After taking a break to meet with his lawyers, Harris, still speaking under oath, read a statement: “Through the testimony I’ve listened to in the last three days … it’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the 9th district seat [in the] general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

Some of the spectators gasped. Reporters stampeded out of the hearing room to break the news.

Harris left the stand and the building, looking somber as he refused to answer questions from the scurrying press corps and disappeared into a waiting car.

The five-member board voted unanimously to hold a new election, but Harris decided not to run again. He cited a serious health scare that had earlier landed him in the hospital.

The consensus among political analysts and editorial writers was that Harris, who had lost two previous runs for office, was finished in politics.

But that was then. This is now: In a campaign announcement video Harris posted on social media in September, he invited voters in North Carolina’s new 8th congressional district—stretching from Cabarrus to Robeson County—to “join me in this comeback story.”

And to answer the media and his opponents in the upcoming race, Harris is invoking the rhetoric and grievances of a certain former president to cast himself as a victim of cheating Democrats and the government agencies they control.

Harris also has been endorsed by Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a fellow Trump-like social conservative and the favorite to win the GOP nomination for governor this year. 

In four hours of interviews with The Assembly, Harris, now 57, said he’s running again because he feels called to serve and “to use the gifts and talents God has given me to stand up and speak up” on issues front-and-center with conservatives. 

But he also appears to be nursing a grudge about losing the seat he felt he won, and an unflagging ambition to make sure there’s a happy ending this time.

“If the Lord doesn’t open the door for me to serve in that capacity, then perhaps I do walk away from running for office at that time,” Harris said. “However, I won that [2018] race, so I guess you could say I’m back to finish what I started.” 

Aligning With Trump

In his nearly five-minute announcement video, Harris charges that Democrats stole the election from him—like they did, he said, to former President Donald Trump. And just as Trump is complaining that the U.S. Department of Justice is being used by the Biden administration to go after him, Harris is pointing to the refusal of the state elections board to certify his victory.

“I was sort of the tip of the spear, in 2018,” Harris said in an interview. “You have the North Carolina Board of Elections that was deciding [it] was going to step in in a way that had the appearance of the weaponization of a government agency.”

One big thing happened recently that reignited Harris’ desire to go to Washington: Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop decided to run for state attorney general next year instead of for another term in Congress. Then the GOP majority in the state legislature redrew the lines of Bishop’s 8th district to keep it friendly to socially conservative Republicans like Harris, an ideological twin to Bishop; the congressman once described himself as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-wall.” 

Harris said he’ll emphasize those issues and go after “Bidenomics” and the Democrats’ “woke” agenda. He added that he’d prefer not to re-litigate the 2018 election. But you’d never guess that from his video, in which he offers a version of what happened that’s at odds with his own parting words from the witness stand. 

In the video, viewers see Harris in the kitchen of his lake home in Mooresville. He looks comfortable in a blue checked shirt, but sounds defiant.

“They drug my name through the mud,” he begins, as a menacing musical score plays in the background.

With a nod and widened eyes, he adds: “They almost killed me.” 

“And they manufactured a scandal to steal the election.”

The music swells and speeds up as a suddenly smiling Harris assures those watching that he’s back. “And I’m not going anywhere,” he says, pointing his finger for emphasis.

Cut to a clip of Trump, flanked by a row of American flags on Election Night 2020, with early returns on the bottom of the screen putting Trump ahead of Biden.

“In 2020,” Harris says, “Democrats stole the election from President Trump. The year before, they did it to me.”

The music rises—“Well, in 2024, President Trump is making a comeback”—then stops.

“And. So. Am. I.”

Harris gives the kind of polished performance you’d expect from a longtime veteran of the pulpit. But by leaving out key facts and embracing conspiracy theories, it’s a political sermon that appears to rely more on the lessons in Trump’s playbook than on those imparted in the Good Book.

“It’s a clear attempt to associate himself with Trumpism because that’s where the vast majority of the likely Republican primary electorate resides,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College. “What the former president is focused on is the politics of grievance. So it may be a helpful alignment [for Harris] to say ‘Trump had an election stolen from him and I can relate to that. … I will fight on his behalf because of that experience.’”

There’s no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That hasn’t stopped Trump and many GOP politicians from continuing to say otherwise. 

Whoever wins the GOP primary in the new 8th district will likely cruise to victory against any Democrat in November. Bitzer said his analysis of 2020 and 2022 voting results showed the Republican candidate for U.S. House in 2024 would have about a 59 to 41 percent advantage over a Democrat.

Now vs. Then 

Harris says in the video that he was eventually “vindicated” in the election fraud scandal. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman, a Democrat, did decide in 2020 not to prosecute him, saying there was no evidence to support a criminal case against Harris. 

But Dowless was indicted on several charges, including obstruction of justice and possession of absentee ballots. The Harris video doesn’t mention the chain-smoking Dowless, a Democrat-turned-Republican who refused to testify at the elections board hearing without being given immunity and died in 2022 before he could go on trial.

Among Harris’ other omissions:

• The State Board of Elections’ decision to call a new election was unanimous. It was also bipartisan, with the two Republican members joining the three Democrats. And Harris could have appealed their decision to the courts, but didn’t.

• Though Harris charges that the Democrats stole the 2018 election, it was Republican Bishop who won that new election in 2019, narrowly defeating McCready. Bishop was then re-elected in 2020 and 2022. “It worked out for Republicans,” said Dallas Woodhouse, who was the state GOP’s executive director at the time. “It just didn’t work out for Mark.”

• Harris did get very sick and was hospitalized in January 2019 with sepsis—a potentially life-threatening condition when the body’s response to infection causes injury to tissues and organs. The next month, he was packing injectable medicine in a cooler for his trips to the election board’s hearing in Raleigh. But to say Democrats “almost killed me” suggests something more sinister than a higher level of stress, which is what doctors told Harris made it harder for him to fight the infection.

• Finally, Harris himself called for a new election from the witness stand. It was a move applauded by DA Freeman in her announcement clearing Harris, but one that disappointed—even angered—some Republicans who wanted to fight on.

Harris’ claims drew a strong rebuke from Josh Lawson, the state election board’s general counsel during the 2019 hearing. At the time, he was a registered Republican whose résumé included stints as a White House staffer during the George W. Bush administration and as an aide to John Ashcroft, Bush’s former attorney general. Lawson is now a registered Democrat.

“It’s discouraging to hear such deliberate deception around the facts,” Lawson told The Assembly. “It seems as if Dr. Harris wants it both ways.”

Harris testified that the evidence discovered by the board made him wish he had acted differently. But now, Lawson said, Harris is claiming it was all a scam by the board to deceive the public and throw the election.

“It’s odd,” Lawson added, “because the two don’t square.”

Still, during interviews, Harris said repeatedly that he should have been a member of Congress. He has a long list of reasons why, including his assertion that there were never enough mishandled ballots to erase his victory margin. 

“I guess you could say I’m back to finish what I started.” 

Mark Harris

He also said he regrets calling for a new election on the witness stand. He said he has learned information since then that was not thoroughly investigated, including that McCready had talked and exchanged text messages in late 2018 with one elections board member. 

Beth Harris, his wife of 36 years, lays out the case in a book the couple paid to have published in 2021. On the back cover of Thirteen Ballots: The Manufactured Scandal That Overturned an Election, she is identified as “the wife of pastor and 2018 Congressman-Elect Mark Harris.”

In its 46-page order, the state Elections Board said “tampering, obstruction and disguise have obscured the precise number of votes either unlawfully counted or excluded.” But it concluded that the election “was corrupted by fraud, improprieties and irregularities so pervasive that its results are tainted.”

Huckabee a Role Model

It’s an autumn Sunday morning at Trinity Baptist Church in Iredell County, where Harris has been the senior pastor since early 2020. He wears a dark suit and a lapel pin emblazoned with the flags of the United States and Israel.

He preaches from the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament. But 20 minutes into his sermon on the courage of Caleb, who stood by the power of God and against the nay-saying crowd, Harris shifts his focus from ancient Israel to modern-day Washington.

The “big news” this week, he tells his flock of 340 mostly older evangelical Christians, was that Republicans in the U.S. House elected Mike Johnson as speaker.

Harris reports that in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Johnson was asked about his conservative views. Johnson’s response, Harris says, was “the quote of the week: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

Mixing politics with religion has been a hallmark of Harris’ career as a candidate and a pastor. 

During his years leading the 1,000-plus congregants at First Baptist Church on the outskirts of downtown Charlotte, Harris hosted Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, then-Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and his good friend and role model, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican who also started out as a Southern Baptist pastor.

In March 2023, Harris invited Lt. Gov. Robinson to speak at Trinity Baptist. Robinson made headlines and got applause and cheers from those in the pews by saying it sickened him whenever he saw a rainbow flag flying at a church. “It’s a direct spit in the face of God Almighty,” he said about the symbol of LGBTQ rights.

In introducing Robinson to the Sunday morning overflow crowd, Harris said that he and the lieutenant governor “have a lot in common. We both reached a point when we saw things happening in our culture and society, when we said, ‘Enough is enough. Somebody’s got to step in, somebody’s got to step up.’”

But Harris envisioned a possible career in politics well before he went into the ministry.

At 14 years old, the Winston-Salem native was stuffing envelopes for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 re-election campaign and took a bus to Washington for the inauguration. He was active in Boys State and Boys Nation, programs designed to give young political junkies a taste of how government works. 

And young Harris posed with U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “Best wishes to Mark Harris. I’m proud of you!” the conservative icon wrote on the photo, which is now among several framed political mementos hanging in Harris’ office at Trinity Baptist.

At Appalachian State University, Harris majored in political science and was planning to go to law school, and then probably run for public office. But he suddenly felt a different calling, and headed for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the town of Wake Forest.

“It may be a helpful alignment to say ‘Trump had an election stolen from him and I can relate to that. … I will fight on his behalf because of that experience.’”

Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College

In 2012, Harris got his first taste of running a campaign. As the newly elected president of the Baptist State Convention, he led the successful statewide fight to pass Amendment One—a state constitutional amendment designed to bolster a North Carolina law banning same-sex marriage.

That win—which a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling later made moot— turned Harris into a rising star in national evangelical circles. He was invited to Washington to address Watchman on the Wall, a conference sponsored by the Family Research Council. The think tank encouraged pastors to promote Biblical values in the public square. 

Two years after that, Harris took a sabbatical from First Baptist to run for the U.S. Senate seat then held by N.C. Democrat Kay Hagan. He came in third in the GOP primary.

In 2016, Harris set his sights on beating incumbent U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger in the 9th District. He came within 134 votes in that Republican primary. So he tried again in 2018, resigning from First Baptist so he could go “all in,” as he put it. This time, Harris defeated Pittenger and, that fall, welcomed Trump to Charlotte for a campaign rally.

A photo of Harris and his wife with Trump giving the thumbs-up also hangs in his church office. So does one taken at Trinity Baptist a few months ago, when Harris announced to members of his congregation that he was considering a run for Congress in 2024. In that picture, church members are extending their supportive hands over Harris in prayer.

“He said he felt like the Lord was leading him to run,” said Lee Burge, who heads Trinity Baptist’s 12-member deacon board. “We gave him our support and blessing.”

Trinity favors “good old-time preaching” and traditional hymns, and wanted a pastor who was not “politically correct,” said Burge, who was on the search committee that brought Harris to the church. “A lot of times pastors will not preach on what the Bible actually says … Call sin sin. But a lot of the pastors are afraid to [speak out against] abortion, homosexuality and all the other things in the news.”

Harris had no such fears, and Burge said the church accepted his answers explaining away the ballot fraud scandal. “I think he was unfairly judged,” said Burge. 

Harris, who plans to stay at Trinity win or lose, said having “pastor” before his name may help him in a conservative district whose Republican-leaning voters don’t seem put off by leaders who profess a Bible-based world view.

“Even in 2016 and in 2018, when I won, I felt at times … that I almost had to apologize for being a pastor,” Harris said. “No more is there any apology at all. Because I think the general public is recognizing that we’ve got to start having leaders that come with discernment”—a Christian term that means seeking God’s will.

A Friendly Crowd

It’s the first Friday in November, which means it’s time for the 74th annual Unionville BBQ in Union County. 

Most of the 19,000 plates are carry-out, but rows of portable tables and chairs have been set up in the gym at Unionville Elementary School—home of the Bobcats—to accommodate those who’d rather dine in.

Harris is here, making his pitch to voters as they sip their iced tea and feast on cole slaw, Brunswick stew, and ‘cue.

“Listen, I’m running for the U.S. House of Representatives again,” he says, handing out campaign brochures and mentioning his website, where they can watch his announcement video. “I don’t know if you’ve heard that through the grapevine or from the news. But I certainly would love to have y’all’s support.”

A good chunk of the votes in the new 8th district are in Union County, and most of those are Republican. Trump got 61.5 percent of the county’s vote in 2020. These will be among the people who decide whether Harris finally makes it to Washington or sees his name become the answer in a trivia game for political junkies.

Based on interviews at the event, it was a friendly crowd for Harris, partly because he’s a pastor. “There’s a lot of Christian conservatives here in Union County,” said Ken Belk, 79, who includes himself and wife, Jan, in that group.

He’s a retired salesman; she’s a retired hairdresser. And both are Republicans who say they’ll probably vote for Harris in the GOP primary on March 5.

“He’s a godly man, and that gets my vote most of the time,” Ken said. “If a man is a man of God—and he certainly is—I’d rather have him up there than anybody else.”

What about the scandal that led some at the time to call Harris a good man who, at the very least, hired some bad people? “It’s not a problem for me at all,” Ken said. 

At another table, David Autry, 36, a Republican who owns a trucking company in Unionville, remembered meeting Harris at the same BBQ event back when he ran last time. “I think he got dealt a bad hand,” Autry said about the scandal. “I don’t think that was his fault.” 

But talk to former Union County commissioner Allan Baucom, one of Harris’ five opponents in the congressional race, and you get a different story.

“I hear lots of comments across the district that are not positive to Mark,” said Baucom, 74, a wealthy farmer-businessman from Monroe.

He said he doesn’t “anticipate” making the scandal a major issue, though his campaign website stresses his honesty and that he’s never run for Congress before.

Besides Baucom and Harris, four others have filed as candidates in the Republican primary: State Rep. John Bradford of Mecklenburg County, who had been planning a run for state treasurer; Chris Maples of Rockingham, a former congressional district director for Bishop; Attorney Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer from Matthews; and Leigh Brown, a real estate agent in Cabarrus County who ran in that second election in 2019 with $1.3 million in contributions from the national Realtors PAC.

Bradford, a businessman, said he planned to loan his campaign up to $2 million and has lined up a heavyweight campaign team. It’ll be led by Paul Shumaker, whose other N.C. clients include U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Graham, and outgoing House Speaker Tim Moore, who is running for Congress in the new 14th congressional district.

Who lives and doesn’t live in the new 8th district, which includes all or part of nine counties, could become an issue. U.S. House members are not required to live in the district they represent.

Bradford’s home in Cornelius is outside its boundaries, though he said his pet software company and fidoalert.com—a kind of Amber Alert for lost pets—“has thousands of clients across” the 8th district.

Harris and his wife still have their home in Mooresville, which is also not in the new 8th congressional district. But in September, the couple also got an apartment in Indian Trail, a suburban town in Union County. 

Harris said the main reason for the move was to cut down on long commutes for Beth, who teaches American history to eighth graders at the nearby Christian school affiliated with First Baptist Church of Indian Trail. The move also makes Harris a resident of the district he’s running to represent.

Harris’ political strength has never come from ties to local officials or the state GOP. He has relied instead on a network of evangelical Christians for everything from door-knockers to donors.

Huckabee flew to North Carolina on November 30 to headline a fundraiser for Harris that drew nearly 400 people. And his campaign has promoted endorsements from two other national evangelical Christian leaders knee-deep in politics: Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

Harris has also been a strong ally over the years with the N.C. Values Coalition, which has pushed for more restrictions on abortion and backed a controversial state law—now repealed—that required people to use the bathroom that matched the gender listed on their birth certificate. 

The group’s executive director, Tami Fitzgerald, told The Assembly that she still considers Harris a “true statesman.”

Repeated Warnings

John Harris had tried early on and repeatedly to warn his father away from hiring that “shady character.” 

In emails to his father in 2016 and again in 2017, Harris, then an attorney in private practice, shared his concerns about Dowless, who had worked for one of Mark Harris’ opponents in the 2016 primary. John Harris’ analysis of absentee ballots led him to suspect that Dowless was cheating. 

But his father went ahead anyway, signing up Dowless to run his 2018 absentee ballot operation in Bladen and Robeson counties. Only later, Mark Harris said, did he find out that Dowless was a convicted felon.

When the scandal broke, Harris and his campaign suggested there had been no red flags.

But the elections board had copies of the emails John Harris had sent his father, laying out his worries. And then on the third day of the February 2019 hearings, they had John Harris himself, on the stand, subpoenaed to testify.

“I love my dad and I love my mom,” Harris, then a 29-year-old assistant U.S. attorney in Raleigh, said as the board, his parents, lawyers, and reporters from around the country looked on. “I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, OK? I think they made mistakes in this process, and they certainly did things differently than I would have done.”

Five years later, Mark Harris is again running for Congress. What does his son think of this latest decision?

“It was his decision. He neither needed nor asked my permission, obviously,” said John Harris in an interview. “We’re both grown adults. … I’m just not involved.”

Does he have an opinion of his father’s announcement video, which charges that Democrats stole the 2018 election from him and manufactured the scandal?

“I certainly didn’t have a thing to do with that video,” said the younger Harris. “Neither was I consulted nor did I have any desire to be on anything that’s going on with this campaign.”

And what does he think now when he looks back at his dramatic testimony, which led many at the time to praise the son and shame the father?

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “My goal in life, and it applied then, is to tell the truth. … Looking back, I’m comfortable with the way I handled everything.”

Now 34 and living with his wife and three children in Apex, Harris said he stays busy practicing law, coaching his son’s flag football team, and rooting for the Carolina Tar Heels. A Republican, he lost his bid in 2022 for an N.C. House seat in Democratic-leaning suburbs in Wake County. Unlike his father, he did not push culture war issues or promote Trump.

“My goal in life, and it applied then, is to tell the truth. … Looking back, I’m comfortable with the way I handled everything.”

John Harris

Harris has an older sister who’s a teacher and a younger brother who’s a pastor. He engages with his father on family matters, such as on a recent FaceTime call celebrating his son’s birthday.

Answering questions about his father’s latest campaign, Harris can sound lawyerly and chilly. But his comments echo some of what Mark Harris told The Assembly when asked about his son’s view of his decision. 

“I called him before I announced. … He doesn’t really hold an opinion one way or another,” the older Harris said. “He certainly doesn’t oppose me as his dad. He loves me as his dad.”

He added, “He didn’t ask me for my permission when he ran for the North Carolina House. So, I certainly didn’t ask for his permission to run.” 

Those 2019 hearings were an emotional roller coaster for the Harris family. In a photo widely published, Mark Harris is crying, his fingers pressed against his lips, as his son ends his testimony by expressing his love for his parents and his hope that his children will get to see a time of less political acrimony.

Mark Harris told The Assembly he “probably” wishes he had followed his son’s advice to steer clear of Dowless. 

But he added a declaration of innocence: “John never felt like I did anything wrong outside of not listening to him and his opinion. … And that if his dad had any fault, it was that he trusted people too much.”