Representative Ted Budd, a North Carolina conservative endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, defeated his Democratic rival, Cheri Beasley, according to The Associated Press, ensuring that Republicans will hold the seat of retiring Senator Richard Burr.
North Carolina’s Senate campaign had been tightly contested for much of the year, as neither Mr. Budd nor Ms. Beasley, a former State Supreme Court chief justice, could open a lead in the polls.
Mr. Budd ran a low-key race, hoping he could ride a national mood hostile to President Biden to victory without attracting attention to his staunch conservatism, which was out of step with the deal-making of Mr. Burr and the state’s other Republican senator, Thom Tillis.
Mr. Budd, a gun store owner and the son of a successful businessman, voted against certifying the 2020 election and had co-sponsored a national ban on abortion.
As he lay low, allies of Mr. Budd, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Club for Growth, blitzed North Carolina airwaves with attack ads, some loaded with racial imagery that portrayed Ms. Beasley as a coddler of criminals. Some Democrats, especially Black women, complained that their party’s infrastructure in Washington was not offering Ms. Beasley enough support.
Ultimately, undecided voters broke for Mr. Budd, as many Democrats in Washington had feared all along, confirming the state’s penchant for handing the national party narrow losses, even as Democrats maintain a grip on its governorship.
Barack Obama and a Senate Democratic candidate, Kay Hagan, won North Carolina in 2008, but Mr. Obama lost there in 2012, Ms. Hagan lost her re-election race to Mr. Tillis in 2014, and President Biden lost in 2020. So did another Democratic Senate candidate, Cal Cunningham, who appeared headed for victory until he was felled by a sex scandal.
