Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Sunday that he will not seek reelection next year in battleground North Carolina. The stunning announcement comes just hours after President Donald Trump said he will start fielding primary challengers to run against Tillis following the senator’s vote against advancing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to a vote in the Senate.
The senator, in a lengthy statement announcing his decision, said it was “not a hard choice” to rule out running for a third term as he was finished with “navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington.”
Tillis is committed to opposing the Republican megabill — a cornerstone of Trump’s domestic policy agenda — because of its Medicaid provisions. He caught the president’s ire on Saturday night after voting against moving the legislation to final consideration in the Senate.
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Trump responded quickly, saying on his social media platform that he’d be meeting with people in the coming weeks to consider who would challenge Tillis in a Republican primary.
Trump accused Tillis of “grandstanding” and said that he was “making a BIG MISTAKE for America, and the Wonderful People of North Carolina!”
In his announcement on Sunday, Tillis likened himself to former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — two lawmakers who retired last cycle after years of pushback from party leaders for often bucking their caucus, particularly on the issue of preserving the Senate filibuster.
“They were shunned after they courageously refused to cave to their party bosses,” Tillis wrote, adding: “It’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.”
“It underscores the greatest form of hypocrisy in American politics. When people see independent thinking on the other side, they cheer. But when those very same people see independent thinking coming from their side, they scorn, ostracize, and even censure them,” Tillis wrote.
Tillis had for weeks been a staunch opponent to the Senate version of the reconciliation bill’s provider tax proposal — a provision that he said North Carolina would lose the most Medicaid coverage under.
MORE: Senate GOP ‘frustrated’ by parliamentarian’s Medicaid ruling in Trump’s bill — but won’t overrule her
During a closed-door GOP conference meeting last week, Tillis is reported to have made the point that Medicaid coverage for more than 600,000 North Carolinians would be at risk under the Senate’s proposal and asked his colleagues to consider how the policy would impact their own states — even providing state-specific data printed out on a handout.
He warned his colleagues of the political implications of the Senate’s Medicaid provider tax framework if it becomes law.
“I just encouraged other members to go to their states and just measure how….take a look at the proposed cuts and tell me whether or not you can absorb it in the normal course of business, and in many cases, you’re gonna find that you can’t,” Tillis told reporters at the Capitol this week.
“I think it’s a matter of doing smart policy, and that’s all I’m suggesting here,” he added.
Tillis has also been one of the few Republican lawmakers who have been — even if slightly — critical of Trump since the president took office in January.
In February, after Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and suggested that Ukraine started the war with Russia, Tillis went farther than any Republican was willing to go, directly invoking Trump’s name in a Senate floor speech that bashed Russian President Vladimir Putin and called for a full defense of Ukraine.
“I’m a Republican. I support President Trump and I believe that most of his policies on national security are right, I believe his instincts are pretty good, but what I am telling you whoever believes that there is any space for Vladimir Putin in the future of a stable globe better go to Ukraine, they better go to Europe, they better invest the time to understand that this man is a cancer and the greatest threat to democracy in my life time,” Tillis said during his fiery floor speech.
Tillis’ retirement sets up what is sure to be a competitive, expensive and crowded primary in North Carolina, an increasingly purple state. Rep. Wiley Nickel has already announced his bid on the Democratic side, with many eyeing popular former Gov. Roy Cooper as another choice.
