Years after questioning his own loss, Pat McCrory has strong words for Jefferson Griffin | Opinion
Not many prominent Republicans have been critical of Jefferson Griffin’s quest to overturn the outcome of the North Carolina Supreme Court race he lost.
But one of the few who have is former Gov. Pat McCrory. He hasn’t shied away from his opposition to Griffin’s effort, including by speaking out about it on his TV show, “Unspun.”
McCrory is no stranger to close elections — he lost reelection to Roy Cooper by a thin margin in 2016. In the immediate aftermath of the election, McCrory, his supporters and the North Carolina Republican Party raised questions about the election results and suggested they might have been tainted by fraud. Nearly a month after Election Day, McCrory conceded the race. In doing so, he admitted he still had “continued questions” about the voting process, but believed that “the majority of our citizens have spoken.”
Raising questions is one thing, McCrory said. But he believes Griffin has taken it to another level by seeking to retroactively change the rules of an election. And even as a Republican who voted for Griffin, it’s something he just can’t agree with.
“If they think they need to change the rules for future elections, I have no problem with that, but you can’t change the rules after the election is over,” McCrory told me. “It’s like changing the rules of the Super Bowl after the game is over and declaring a different winner. You can’t do that.”
McCrory’s initial questioning of his loss in 2016 felt like a new political low then, and it thrust North Carolina into the national spotlight. It was wrong in almost every sense: protests filed by McCrory’s supporters made flimsy claims maligning innocent voters, and his campaign suggested something nefarious had happened with some people’s absentee ballots. Nearly every accusation was thrown out by local elections boards, which at the time were controlled by Republicans.
In subsequent years, some would hold up McCrory as an early adopter of election denialism that eventually became rampant among Republicans. When Donald Trump began propagating lies of a “stolen election” in 2020, media outlets pointed to McCrory as someone who tried to “overturn an election” first, with one expert labeling him the “amateur Trump.”
But in accepting defeat, McCrory did something that Griffin and Trump have not. He readily admits that he lost the election fair and square. That feels almost gracious by today’s standards, given the intransigence we see from so many Republicans today.
McCrory maintains that his campaign’s actions in 2016 were proper. He was following a process that was outlined by state law, he says. But after a certain point, he knew that the best thing to do was concede, despite calls from his supporters to “keep fighting,” he told me.
“I understand statistics, and the statistics showed me that it was time to move on, regardless of how much more fight we were willing to give,” McCrory said. “And I should note, I could not find sufficient fraud which would overcome my deficit. It was tough, but it was the right thing to do.”
It was wrong of McCrory’s campaign to claim there was fraud without proof. It hurt the voters who were falsely accused of wrongdoing, and it sowed seeds of distrust in what was clearly a legitimate election. But McCrory is right to say that Griffin has taken it to another level. Like McCrory, Griffin was well within his rights to request a recount, but unlike McCrory, he did not respect its outcome. State law allows Griffin to file protests with election officials, but he did not respect their decisions.
McCrory, for his part, has made it a goal to boost voter confidence in elections. Last year, he helped launch the North Carolina chapter of RightCount, an organization whose goal is to educate people about the election process so that they can trust the results. RightCount has run television ads criticizing Griffin’s “attack on our elections.”
“It’s tough to criticize my own party, because there are people who will be upset,” McCrory said. “But we’ve got to have the courage to speak out, on both sides of the aisle, even when the outcome doesn’t fall our way.”
This story was originally published April 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Years after questioning his own loss, Pat McCrory has strong words for Jefferson Griffin | Opinion."
