LEXINGTON, N.C. — The thing Cal Cunningham said made him the most angry during his failed 2020 bid for the U.S. Senate wasn’t the leaked text messages about an extramarital affair. It was about barbecue.

What You Need To Know

  •  In 2020, Cunningham lost the election to Republican Sen. Thom Tillis by 1.8%. That amounts to about 95,000 votes

  •  A tweet over barbecue caused quite a stir for the candidate

  •  There were also leaked text messages about an extramarital affair

The sex scandal that dogged the end of the Democrat’s Senate campaign was a big deal. But for a man who comes from Lexington, North Carolina, barbecue is sacred too. 

“My phone started blowing up from some of my dearest friends of all time: what the heck Cal?” he said in an interview with Spectrum News 1.

The calls started coming after a tweet with a photo from Cunningham’s campaign account showed the candidate with hotdog buns and a gas grill, with the words, “There's nothing better than BBQ—except for winning this Senate seat, of course.”

North Carolina Republicans tore into Cunningham as being out of touch. Real North Carolina barbecue, east, west and Lexington, would never touch a gas grill.

“My dear lovely out-of-state staff just swung and missed,” he said. The photo showed him wearing a campaign apron that read “Ambassador for North Carolina BBQ."

He said at the time, and reiterated to Spectrum News 1 recently, that he was cooking hotdogs and hamburgers for his kids when someone took that photo. 

Related: Four years later: Catching up with former U.S. Senate candidate Cal Cunningham

“I was more angry, more frustrated than just about anything that would happen,” Cunningham said, sitting at a table at Lexington BBQ, a restaurant he said he’s been going to his entire life. 

But then, in the final weeks of the campaign, the text messages between Cunningham, who is married, and a married woman leaked into the press. 

“It was a whirlwind, it was a moment to reflect on first principles in my life,” Cunningham said. “I made a terrible personal mistake.”

But, he said, he owned up to it. 

“I wasn’t going to wag my finger and say I didn’t do something that I had done. I wasn’t going to call it fake news,” he said. “I wasn’t going to try to silence people. Those are the roads that we have seen traveled.”

“I tried to take responsibility for my mistake,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham lost that election to Republican Sen. Thom Tillis by 1.8%. That amounts to about 95,000 votes.

Cunningham said he can never know if the scandal lost him the election.

“It didn’t help,” he said. “I don’t know that we could know that it decided the election.”

At the time, the 2020 race between Tillis and Cunningham was the most expensive in United States history.

But after a hard-fought campaign, Cunningham said he and Tillis are now on friendly terms. 

“I need him, and North Carolina needs him, to succeed in Washington if we’re going to succeed as a people,” he said.

“What we, he and I, have tried to model for the rest of North Carolina, is after the hammer and tong of beating up each other and venting and airing the issues, the election’s over. And for our republic to succeed, we have to figure out how to work together once the polls are closed,” he said. 

Cunningham complimented Tillis on working toward compromise in Washington.

When asked if he would run for office again, Cunningham said, “I will never say never.”

Almost four years out from the 2020 General Election, Cunningham said, “I continue to actively think about how to be a contributor to society and do good things and that’s purposeful. The work in the military is purposeful. And I’m doing better than I probably ought to be.”