According to Tuesday night’s election results, Republican Tricia Cotham appears to have narrowly won re-election to a hotly contested House seat in southeast Mecklenburg. After Cotham switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP last year, Democrats made it a point to defeat her.

The Cotham-Sidman race is the most closely watched race in the General Assembly this year. Cotham sent shockwaves through North Carolina politics in 2023 with her surprise switch from Democrat to Republican. That gave Republicans a long-sought supermajority in both the North Carolina House and Senate and allowed them to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes at will.

Cotham supported Republican overrides allowing new abortion restrictions after 12 weeks, hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending on private school vouchers and other GOP priorities.

Her move was particularly shocking because the Cotham name had a long history in Mecklenburg County Democratic Party circles. Her mother, Pat Cotham, is a longtime Democratic county commissioner. Tricia Cotham also gained national attention in 2015 with an emotional speech in the NC House of Representatives in which she described her own experience with an abortion for medical reasons.

Republicans redid Cotham’s district in Mint Hill and East Charlotte to make it more favorable to a Republican, but the new District 105 remained an undecided seat.

Sidman’s strategy focused on highlighting Cotham’s alleged betrayal and the political impact, such as abortion restrictions, that her move had on the state.

Cotham tried to tie Sidman, who works at Temple Beth El in Charlotte, to left-wing positions with a series of television ads and mailers in which, based on her answers to previous candidate questionnaires on criminal reform, she said she wanted to “legalize prostitution and . . .” Hardcore drugs like heroin and meth.”

Democrats invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the race to win.

But with all precincts running, Cotham was ahead of Democratic challenger Nicole Sidman by 278 votes, or half a percentage point, as of Tuesday night.

The Mecklenburg Democrats had good news. Beth Helfrich won a seat in the North Mecklenburg House of Representatives that had previously been held by a Republican. She defeated former Huntersville Mayor Melinda Bales.

“We have built a people-driven, combative and powerful grassroots campaign. And I’m proud of it. And it was always focused on really connecting with the people of District 98 and finding out what they have to say and what matters most to them,” Helfrich said.

And in a state Senate race in south Charlotte, Democrat Woodson Bradley had a 27-vote lead over Republican challenger Stacie McGinn – a race that could be decided by preliminary votes in the coming days.