On Tuesday, oil and propane businessman Frank McNeill won the Democratic nomination to face three-term GOP Rep. Richard Hudson in North Carolina's 8th CD. McNeill, a former mayor of Aberdeen (population 7,500) and past president of the state's petroleum marketers association, is a centrist Democrat whose third-generation family business is well-known in the Sandhills region. He raised a noteworthy $240,000 in the first quarter of 2018.
The 8th CD stretches from the northern Charlotte suburbs to Democratic-leaning Fayetteville and voted for President Trump 56 percent to 41 percent in 2016. However, McNeill will try to play up his deep local roots and tar Hudson as a longtime party operative and Capitol Hill insider who only used the 8th CD as a launching pad after serving as a chief of staff to three different GOP members of Congress in the decade prior to his 2012 election.
Hudson is an effective fundraiser who ended March with $923,000 on hand, so he should have the communication advantage in a district that spans both the Charlotte and Raleigh media markets. But the danger
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