Long before his run for attorney general, Dan Bishop was a conservative hardliner

In 1997, an especially conservative 33-year-old lawyer named Dan Bishop ran for Charlotte City Council.

The debates then: whether some city services should be privatized, taxes, public funding for the arts and development.

Bishop ran against a more moderate and much older Republican incumbent. The political newcomer had support from Don Reid, an influential conservative already on the City Council.

Still, he lost.

“Voters appreciate a sensible analysis of the issues rather than some blind ideology,” his 70-year-old opponent, Charlie Baker, said after winning.

Bishop said he learned a simple lesson from the run.

“I learned you can’t win an election with yard signs,” he said.

His profile has grown 27 years later, and he’s found new allies. People who knew him in decades past say he’s always been a hardliner, but a tactical one.

“I had my way, and he had his way,” said Debbie Ware, another conservative who ran for City Council against the old guard in 1997. “And his way was professional and fine-tuned and prepared. My way was seat-of-the-pants. And when you’re an attorney, you just don’t do seat-of-the-pants.”

She knew Bishop would have a long political career. Now, he faces the prospect of a historic election Nov. 5.

He wants to overturn a century-long trend by becoming the state’s first Republican attorney general since Zeb V. Walser in the 1890s. He has a good shot, one expert said.

“This election is essentially a toss-up,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told The Charlotte Observer. A Carolina Journal poll in August showed Bishop ahead, 42% to 38%. A WRAL poll earlier this month showed Bishop down, 43% to 36%, with 21% undecided.

Bishop declined multiple interview requests for this story but answered questions over email Tuesday.

Bishop’s opponent is another Charlotte-area lawyer-turned-congressman, Jeff Jackson. The two have little else in common.

In his email to the Observer, Bishop said he is the youngest of five children, and that his parents from Bladen County and Guilford County “grew up very poor.”

After serving in World War II, his father made a career of dentistry in Charlotte, where he and his family have roots.

Bishop has been married to his wife, Jo, for 26 years. His son, Jack, is in law school.

A tough litigator on county board

Bishop returned to legal work and remained active in Republican politics after his loss in the City Council election. In 2000, he represented the state GOP when it sued Democrat Mike Easley, then the attorney general running for governor, for public records that could be used for opposition research.

Bishop filed in 2004 to run for the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners after some hesitation. Republican Carla DuPuy, the board’s former three-term chairwoman, had re-entered politics and filed to run.

“My gut tells me that I could not beat Carla if I wanted to,” he said in an email to supporters, which The Charlotte Observer reported at the time. He liked her personally and didn’t relish the idea of a “bruising” campaign, he added.

But about 100 people reached out to him and urged him to get back in the race. He did about a week later.

DuPuy, Bishop and another candidate filed for the District 5 seat. Bishop argued he would do more to cut taxes and DuPuy was more moderate than she let on.

Despite her three terms as board chair, he beat her. He faced no general election challenger.

He summed up his take on politics succinctly in a 2005 Observer profile when he was a new county commissioner.

“There are a lot of people who think we should never have any partisan disagreement over anything and we should just get along,” he said then. “I don’t think that’s serving anyone. I think it’s very important to be pleasant to people and be professional with them, and to actively look for points of agreement, but it’s also just as important to tell them when they’re wrong.”

A colleague remembered him that way.

Dumont Clarke, a Democrat who served on the board with Bishop, said Bishop was a “true red conservative” and a sharp, scrutinizing presence.

Bishop was cordial, and he had a good grasp on issues, Clarke said. But he remembered how often Bishop interrogated someone.

“He has all the natural instincts of a litigator,” Clarke said. “It took the staff, the commission a while to get used to the fact that… if they got up to make a presentation, Dan was going to treat them as a hostile witness and cross-examine.”

Bishop learned the basics of local government during that time, he said in his email to the Observer Tuesday.

“Serving as county commissioner gave me perspective on local government that now rounds out my experiences in the legislature and Congress, so that I bring a broad background in public service as well as a long and sophisticated legal career to the position of attorney general,” he said.

The issues weren’t as partisan or controversial on the board. That would change with Bishop’s next election.

Legal work

After serving on the board for two terms, Bishop again focused on legal work in 2009.

He said he was proud to have spent three decades working as a lawyer, “which spans more than 400 career appearances of record in the state and federal trial and appellate courts of North Carolina, including the 24 cases designated complex and litigated in the Business Court.”

He’s also proud to have worked for a small firm most of his career, he said, representing “the less wealthy litigant against well-heeled adversaries employing bigger, more expensive firms.”

His longtime friend and former law partner, Todd Capitano, saw it the same way.

“You know, at a small firm, you’re not going to be hired to represent the Bank of Americas and the Wells Fargos of the world,” Capitano said. “More often than not, you’re going to be representing somebody who’s viewed as the underdog ... That was the kind of case that really got Dan’s attention.”

He remembered Bishop as an attorney who planned, did not procrastinate and did good, thorough work.

“Dan’s probably in the top two or three litigators that I’ve come across in terms of just his legal acumen, his insight into law, his legal researching abilities,” he said. “He may be the hardest-working lawyer I’ve ever come across, too. He digs into something.”

‘Bathroom bill’ architect

After a six-year political hiatus, Bishop announced a 2014 run for the state House of Representatives.

“I’m known to people in that House district,” he told the Observer at the time. “They know who I am. They know me to be conservative. They know me not to be a bomb-thrower, to be an effective advocate.”

He ran against a Libertarian and won easily.

“I’m proud of North Carolina’s boom decade, which the legislature’s thoughtful pro-economy policies helped usher in,” he said of his time in the General Assembly. “We cut taxes, we kept in place proper and effective regulations and eliminated bureaucratic red tape. We helped return the state to a place in which people aren’t burdened by government, and from there determine their own success.”

Many know him for something else in the legislature.

In his first term, he landed at the center of one of the biggest controversies in North Carolina’s recent history.

When Charlotte proposed a nondiscrimination ordinance that extended some protections to LGBTQ+ people, Bishop called it a “radical transgender proposal” that would serve as a “political and legal overreach.” There could be consequences in the courts or the legislature, he warned.

When the ordinance passed, he wrote House Bill 2, North Carolina’s controversial and consequential “bathroom bill.”

That bill said people needed to use the public bathroom of their sex assigned at birth. It also barred cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage standards. Then-Gov. Pat McCrory, another Republican from Charlotte, signed it into law.

“I think what we’re doing today is preserving a sense of privacy that people have long expected in private facilities,” Bishop said when introducing the bill in committee.

The state and national backlash was swift and intense. Lawsuits were filed days after it became statute, and businesses canceled deals across the state.

In 2017, the General Assembly partially repealed HB2.

Bishop was elected to the North Carolina Senate in 2016 against Democrat Lloyd Scher, serving there for two years.

“Reporters’ and fringe activists’ obsession with HB2 is just weird,” he wrote when asked about the bill’s legacy.

But does he think it should have stayed the law?

Women “need to know I am committed to defending their rights when I’m Attorney General, a commitment my opponent does not share,” he said, referencing his opposition to transgender women participating in college and high school sports.

Embracing Trump

In 2019 he made his first run for national office.

He won a special election to represent District 9 in the U.S. House of Representatives after working directly with President Donald Trump and then-Rep. Mark Meadows, who would go on to be Trump’s chief of staff. It happened as the Republican Party shifted, increasingly leaning on Trump.

“We talked about a full embrace of President Trump and running a decidedly pro-Trump message about Day 5 or Day 6 of early voting,” Meadows told McClatchy after Bishop’s victory. “I saw the numbers start to change at that point.”

The president took credit, too.

“Dan Bishop was down 17 points 3 weeks ago,” Trump posted on social media on election night. “He then asked me for help, we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race.”

One county GOP chair observed that Bishop’s history with the “bathroom bill,” thought to be a political weakness, was in fact a strength in some parts of the district.

“When they called him the bathroom bill sponsor, they thought they were attacking him,” Robeson County’s Phillip Stephens said at the time. “But in the rural areas that was seen as a compliment.”

It was a sign of the politics to come.

Freedom Caucus

In Congress, Bishop has been one of the more prominent members of the Freedom Caucus, a group of Republican hardliners.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined a “Reopen NC” demonstration in Raleigh, where protesters urged Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to lift a stay-at-home order that closed some businesses. Bishop has long been critical of an immigration system that he sees as too lenient, “sanctuary cities” and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom he tried to impeach with the help of most Republicans in the House. And when Trump lost the 2020 election, Bishop was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results.

Last year, he and other Freedom Caucus members tried to block Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker as a government shutdown loomed. Bishop at first mulled over ousting McCarthy from the speakership, but voted against it.

Capitano, his longtime friend, said critical news coverage of Bishop often misses his true character. Bishop is selfless and a devoted friend, he said.

“We had a lady we worked with who lost her daughter when she was in elementary school,” he recalled. “The way Dan sort of embraced that family and was there to comfort them was inspirational to me.”

Capitano had mostly known him as an “aggressive litigator” at that point.

“The abililty to comfort a grieving mom that we worked with was a side of Dan that I hadn’t seen before,” he said. But over the years, he said he saw other times where Bishop’s compassion helped someone.

Vision as attorney general

After months of rumor, Bishop announced in August 2023 that he would run to be North Carolina’s attorney general so he could “restore law and order,” especially in cities like Charlotte and Asheville. He made the announcement back home on WBT, a radio station in Charlotte.

“I think it’s a particular time to reinforce support for prosecutors and front-line law enforcement officers,” he said then, adding that Congress was too slow-moving.

He listed some priorities to the Observer.

He wants to “end this dangerous practice, established by Democrat attorneys general over the past decade, of deciding which state laws to defend and which to ignore.” He plans to support law enforcement and prosecutors “in enforcing the law, including immigration law,” he said. And he echoed that he would “restore a culture of law and order,” which he contended was eroded by Democrats who have held the office.

If elected, he said, he would challenge “legally dubious” national decisions.

“The Biden administration’s debt forgiveness, for example, mostly benefits college-educated liberals in big cities, many of whom already earn more than blue collar workers,” he said. “It’s wrong to force the high school graduate factory worker to pay off student loans for a white-collar college graduate and especially wrong to abuse legal mechanisms to effect that result outside the law.”

Attorneys general in Republican-led states have successfully challenged President Joe Biden’s attempts at student-loan debt forgiveness.

‘Anyone’s race’

Two other Trump-brand Republicans in Congress backed him: Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert. Bishop’s entrance into the race pushed out Andrew Murray, a district attorney in the mountains who previously served as Mecklenburg County’s top prosecutor and as a United States attorney.

Bishop touted Trump’s endorsement at a rally this summer.

“Everyone said: Who is he?” the former president said, recalling when he endorsed Bishop before. “Turned out to be an incredible congressman, but now he’s running for attorney general, and he’s going to be your next attorney general.”

It’s anyone’s race, said Cooper, the political science professor at Western Carolina University.

In the last attorney general race, Democrat Josh Stein beat Republican Jim O’Neill by just 13,626 votes: 2,713,407 to 2,699,781.

“Both candidates have name recognition, access to party networks, fundraising experiences, and experience in electoral politics,” he wrote. “Our last attorney general race was decided by fewer than 14,000 votes. I don’t see any reason why this time should be any different.”

Jackson has called Bishop an extremist, and Bishop has some criticism of his own.

“He’s like a mannequin – he adopts whatever persona he thinks is best based on the political winds of the day,” he said.

A Republican attorney general isn’t actually so novel an idea in 2024, Cooper said. Democrats used to hold “almost every” office in North Carolina, he noted.

It’s not that way anymore.

Asked if his political philosophy had changed since the his days as a county commissioner, Bishop wrote: “I’ve always been a conservative. What public office revealed to me is just how rotten political leaders unconstrained by law can be — many will use their power to try to advance their own ambitions.”