Overview:
• Ray Daly is trying to unseat McInnis in state Senate District 21
• Daly says McInnis broke a promise not to expand the Medicaid health insurance program. McInnis says Daly is wrong
• Daly’s ads and comments have also criticized McInnis on growth and development regulations
State Sen. Tom McInnis, who represents Moore and Cumberland counties in the N.C. General Assembly, is threatening to sue his 2026 election opponent Ray Daly for libel. A cease-and-desist letter from the state senator’s lawyer asserts Daly falsely accused McInnis of lying to voters and of cozying up with developers.
The letter, dated November 26, noted that North Carolina law says it is a misdemeanor to spread false reports about election candidates.
“Well, it just appears that he’s saying things in his ads that are incorrect and not fully truthful,” McInnis told CityView. “We’ve just brought that to his attention in a professional way and hopefully he’ll handle himself accordingly.”
Daly—who said he used to be a McInnis supporter, and that he held a fundraiser several years ago for McInnis along with other candidates—is challenging McInnis in the Republican primary for Senate District 21. The district covers all of Moore County and most of Cumberland County outside of Fayetteville. Daly said he received the letter on Thanksgiving Day.
“It was a bad move on his part, that he made this threat,” Daly told CityView.
The cease-and-desist letter gave Daly a deadline of 5 p.m. December 2 to delete, unpublish, and retract his comments and campaign advertisements that criticized McInnis on topics related to Medicaid and development. It called for Daly to publish corrections that say his statements about McInnis were unsubstantiated.
“We remain willing to resolve this matter amicably if you promptly comply with the demands above,” McInnis’ lawyer Philip R. Thomas wrote in the letter.
Daly did not comply. He said he is telling the truth about McInnis on matters important to the voters.
The cease-and-desist letter cites Daly’s ads and comments on Facebook that accuse McInnis of:
- Breaking a promise to oppose efforts by Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper to expand the Medicaid government health insurance program to cover hundreds of thousands of lower-income North Carolinians who previously did not qualify for it.
- Supporting legislation to strip city, town, and county governments of their powers to control growth and development.
While the letter suggests that McInnis will sue Daly for libel, McInnis declined to say whether he would. “Don’t have any comment on what the future looks like. We’re just waiting to see what happens,” he said.
Expanded Medicaid
The question of Medicaid expansion was a battleground between North Carolina’s Democratic governors and the Republican-controlled General Assembly from the early 2010s to the early 2020s.
Due to the structure of the Obamacare program and a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that partly struck down the Affordable Care Act, lower-income people who could not afford health insurance or whose employers were not providing it were caught in a health insurance “coverage gap.” They neither qualified for Medicaid or for assistance via the Obamacare health insurance marketplace. Their unpaid medical bills were a growing problem for them and for hospitals trying to avoid shutting down.
The Republicans who opposed Medicaid expansion cited the costs to the North Carolina taxpayer and their questions as to whether some people should receive free health insurance from the government.
Their opposition softened in the early 2020s, when a deal emerged to have the federal government split the cost with health care providers instead of putting the added cost on the North Carolina government.
The state legislature approved Medicaid expansion in March 2023 and it took effect in December that year. All the Democrats and most of the Republicans, including McInnis, voted for it. Over the past two years, more than 690,000 people have enrolled, the state reported, and were receiving health care.
Daly has blasted McInnis for his vote.
“Don’t be fooled again. He lied to his constituents,” says one of Daly’s ads. “Senator Tom McInnis promised that he wouldn’t vote for Governor Cooper’s Medicaid expansion bill. He did.”
Daly’s lawyer, Michael Porter of Fayetteville, says in a December 2 letter to McInnis and Thomas that “Sen. McInnis made this promise directly to Mr. Daly, in person, on numerous occasions. It was an unequivocal promise about any future Medicaid expansion.” McInnis made similar statements to other Republicans, Porter wrote.
Daly is wrong, McInnis said. “It ain’t what he says it is in his comments,” he said.
“I always said I would not vote for Medicaid expansion until, No.1, we knew how many people we’re talking about,” McInnis said. “And it had to have certain parameters and certain qualifications for me to even consider it,” including a work requirement for recipients who are able to work.
Ultimately the federal courts negated the possibility of a work requirement, McInnis said, but the final program otherwise satisfied his concerns.
The federal government covers 90% of the cost, he said, while health care providers cover 10%.
“We also got a substantial amount of money for doing it that way,” he said. “Versus had we not gone along with it and worked with the feds to bring it forth in a business—a professional-like—manner, the reimbursement could have been as low as 60% plus a substantial penalty that would have been attached to it.”
Reduced Restrictions on Developers
Daly’s comments on social media and his campaign ads accuse McInnis of curtailing the ability of cities, towns, and counties to regulate developers seeking to build in Moore County.
An ad cited in the McInnis cease-and-desist letter shows aerial video of strip shopping centers, apartments under construction, and a neighborhood of single family homes under construction. “Senator Tom McInnis has sided with special interest groups in Raleigh, supporting bills that make it easier for developers to promote expansion that’s jamming our roads and crowding our neighborhoods,” a narrator in the ad says.
On Facebook, according to screenshots included with the cease-and-desist letter, Daly says McInnis sought legislation to “dismantle the building moratoriums set by our local elected officials.”
N.C. General Assembly records show that McInnis voted this year to cancel a commercial development moratorium in Taylortown in Moore County and limit future such moratoriums there. That bill became law. He sought a similar measure in 2023 for Pinehurst, although it never was enacted.
McInnis this year sponsored legislation to stop local governments from regulating short-term rentals (commonly known as Airbnbs). Daly said he disagrees with that proposal.
“I’ve been a proponent of private property rights, a proponent of reasonable home building and reasonable development, not anything crazy,” McInnis said.
Daly also said online and to CityView that McInnis supports Senate Bill 205, which passed the state Senate and is pending in the state House. “If SB 205 gets the green light, it means Raleigh could dictate how our county develops, potentially paving the way for unchecked urban sprawl,” Daly wrote on Facebook.
McInnis takes issue with Daly’s comments about SB205. When McInnis voted on the bill in April, it was exclusively about residential swimming pools, and had nothing to do with regulating development. The bill was only two pages long.
After McInnis and the Senate unanimously approved the bill and sent it to the House of Representatives, House members added 17 more pages.
The new pages would reduce or block the ability of local governments to regulate the length and width of buildings, mandate the number of parking spaces, the size of some driveways, the design of public streets within developments, the size, location, and number of curb cuts a development can have, and other construction and development matters.
“I have not had the privilege or opportunity to vote for or against anything that was done to it after it left the Senate,” McInnis said.
Illegal to Lie About a Candidate?
The McInnis cease-and-desist letter cites a North Carolina law from 1931 that says it is illegal to tell lies about a candidate for elected office.
Specifically, the law says no one is allowed to “publish or cause to be circulated derogatory reports with reference to any candidate in any primary or election, knowing such report to be false or in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity” in order to affect the outcome of the election.
Thomas, McInnis’ lawyer, told Daly his portrayal of McInnis as a liar who is doing the bidding of special interests “fits squarely within the conduct the statute is trying to address.”
But the law appears to be an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of speech provision in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously said so in 2023 when it considered a dispute between Gov. Josh Stein and Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill following their race for attorney general in 2020. O’Neill said Stein had broken the law by spreading false information about him, which Stein challenged. The court ruled in favor of Stein.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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