NC-SEN: Thom Tillis Grew Up In A Mobile Home, Then He Hiked Taxes On Them
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’s first ad of the general election struck familiar tones for a politician aiming to reintroduce himself to the electorate. The ad, which depicts a young family moving into a mobile home, is meant to play up Tillis’s working-class roots as unemployment skyrockets due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Rental houses in Louisiana, trailer parks in Florida and Tennessee. We moved seven times before I was 16, living paycheck to paycheck,” Tillis says in the 30-second ad, which ran for most of June. “We will build this economy back, and I’ll remember who needs it the most.”
In the ad, titled “Humble,” Tillis says he grew up with “strong parents and humble people in humble places.”
But a new digital ad from Cal Cunningham, the former military prosecutor and state senator who won the Democratic nomination to challenge Tillis, notes the Republican, when he was serving as speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives in 2013, voted to hike taxes on mobile home buyers like the ones he grew up with.
That year, as part of a tax reform law that cut corporate and income taxes that passed mostly along party lines, Tillis voted to scrap a $600 cap on the sales tax a mobile home buyer would need to pay, and to double the sales tax rate on mobile homes from 2% to 4.75%.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/thom-tillis-mobile-home-tax-hike-cal-cunningham-campaign-ad_n_5efa6408c5b6acab2845c88d
