What if Thom Tillis was like this all along? | Opinion
Ever since dropping his bid for re-election, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis has been a changed man.
He’s never been particularly camera-shy, but lately he’s been willing to speak in unvarnished terms. The most recent example came Tuesday, when reporters asked him for his opinion on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her agency’s operations in Minneapolis.
“She has taken this administration into the ground on an issue that we should own,” Tillis told them, according to video from CNN. “We should own the issue of border security and immigration, but they have destroyed that for Republicans. Something that got the president elected, they have destroyed it through their incompetence.”
He’s right, and Republicans who actually want to win can feel that in their bones. The quiet majority of GOP voters who care more about results than the peccadillos of President Donald Trump have been waiting for someone to say it.
It’s become a common trope in American politics that the moment a Republican stops being a threat, Democrats and the national progressive media suddenly discover a strange new respect for him. There’s certainly an element of that at work here.
But I’ve got a sneaking suspicion Tillis has felt this way for a long time and just didn’t say it plainly. This unfiltered version of Tillis is a far cry from the political survivor who spent years carefully navigating the choppy waters of the MAGA era.
The simple explanation is that if he’d talked like this while he was still on the ballot, Republicans would have run him out of the Senate on a rail.
I’m not so sure that’s true.
The knock on Tillis
Tillis has never been a grassroots favorite, and he’s been labeled a “RINO” or liberal in disguise for years. But the knock hasn’t really been his policy positions so much as his demeanor.
“I don’t need some lily-livered, jelly-backed, spineless toad like Thom Tillis wanting to cross his legs,” former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson said to a cheering crowd in the waning days of his dumpster-fire campaign for governor.
I generally don’t listen to Robinson for electoral advice, but there’s a reason the “spineless” label stuck. It wasn’t just about a handful of high-profile votes. It was the pattern of flirting with independence, then tacking back, signaling resistance, then smoothing it over.
Even his defenders struggled to describe his fixed convictions.
Thom McCain
So let’s run a thought experiment. What if Tillis had decided years ago that his job was to say what he believed, even when it irritated the loudest people in his coalition?
Picture him doing what he’s doing now, only earlier. Not “anti-Trump,” and not “MAGA.” Just a steady, blunt insistence that incompetence is not an acceptable cost of doing politics in the Trump era.
In that version of history, the censure crowd still would have tried to make an example out of him. He’d still never become a grassroots hero. The question is whether it would have worked anyway. Would the broader electorate have punished him for it, or rewarded him.
I think it might have done the latter, for a reason that gets missed in our current political mood. North Carolina Republican primaries are noisy, but they are not a closed club of the most online activists. A statewide Republican electorate includes plenty of people who adore Trump, and plenty who want conservative outcomes without the daily chaos.
People scoff when you invoke the late John McCain. If you’re on the far right, you likely remember only Trump’s bullying of the Arizonan in his final years of life. If you’re a McCain admirer, you might see Tillis as a poor filler of his “maverick” shoes.
But here’s what people forget. McCain won his last re-election race in 2016 by about 13 points, while Trump carried Arizona by only 3.5. The point isn’t that McCain was universally loved. He wasn’t. The point is that voters believed he operated from a core. Even when they were furious, they could describe who he was.
The tragedy of the Tillis era might be that he spent so much energy threading impossible needles that he forgot to build a platform of his own. If he had used the blunt, balls-and-strikes energy he’s showing now back when he was still fighting for his seat, could he have become a true North Carolina statesman.
We’ll never know. He’s finally speaking the truth, but he’s doing it from the departure lounge.
So yes, maybe this is who Thom Tillis was all along. The tragedy is that North Carolina only got to meet him after he stopped asking for our votes.
Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.
This story was originally published January 29, 2026 at 8:06 AM with the headline "What if Thom Tillis was like this all along? | Opinion."