If Democrats are to have a shot at winning North Carolina in the November presidential election, they must close the deal with voters like Megan Chambers.
Chambers is one of hundreds of thousands of transplants from the state – many high plateaus and from northern cities – that have helped transform many of the state’s rural communities into suburban subdivisions and shopping malls linked by a labyrinth of wide highways.
The influx has also driven a shake-up of the state’s politics and its effect on the national political map, giving Democrats new life in the traditionally conservative South.
However, the shift is incomplete. Chambers, a 26-year-old graduate student, believes President Trump is ignorant and even central. But she has reservations about 77-year-old Joe Biden because of his age and other reasons, and considers an obscure third-party candidate.
“I don’t know anyone who’s really, really excited and loves Joe Biden,” said Chambers, a native of Ohio, amidst the peaches and tomatoes at a farmers market in Raleigh.
Polls show Biden and Trump locked up in a dead heat in North Carolina, perhaps the closest game of the field-fighting states.
Trump needs nearly 15 North Carolina election votes to win re-election. It’s one reason why Republicans initially chose Charlotte, the state’s largest city, for its four-day national convention, which begins Monday.
The coronavirus crisis is setting hard limits to personal presence and the party will instead keep most of its events online, as Democrats did last week.
The state is not so critical of Biden given its hold on voting California and New York, and its apparent advantage in other major swing states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But a Biden win here would almost guarantee his way to the White House. And North Carolina was also able to give Democrats control of the Senate, and thus of both houses of Congress, giving a Democratic president the ability to make major legislative changes.
Given the high stakes, the parties are spending a fortune on TV commercials.
Polls show sen. Thom Tillis, the Republican commitment, behind Cal Cunningham, his Democratic challenger. Their campaigns and groups outside spend $ 10 million a week on television commercials, according to a Democratic operative that monitors the money.
The presidential race, including the Democratic primary last spring, has so far generated nearly $ 160 million in television spending, the operative said.
“It’s going to be very expensive and brutal and you’re seeing unknown third party money come in all of a sudden,” said Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor who is now a radio host.
McCrory was hit by the demographic shift in his 2016 reelection race.
He won 72 of the state’s 100 counties, but lost narrowly to Roy Cooper, a Democrat who ran big margins in suburbs and cities, including Charlotte, where McCrory had served 14 years as mayor.
“New York has moved to North Carolina,” McCrory said.
Morgan Jackson, a political adviser to Cooper and Cunningham, said Virginia is a better comparison. The once-reliable Republican state has trended Democratic in recent years due to the growth of various and liberal suburbs in the Washington, DC area
In addition to statewide races, Democrats in North Carolina are expected to pick up at least two seats in the U.S. House and hope to win back state legislation, in large part because courts struck gerrymandered district maps last year and favored new orders. for Democrats.
If Democrats win the State House or Senate, they will have a vote in drawing the next set of cards after the 2020 census, which could help their party at the national level for the next decade.
Valerie Biden Owens, sister of Joe Biden, joins a virtual town hall.
But Democrats have seen their hopes dashed here in the past.
In presidential races, Democrats have won only once in the past four decades – when Barack Obama won a tight victory over Sen. in 2008. John McCain came out.
Four years later, Democrats nominated Obama for a second term at a convention in Charlotte, but Obama narrowly lost to Mitt Romney. North Carolina was one of only two states to run that year.
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 3.6 percentage points here.
Since then, the state’s voter turnout has grown by about 160,000 people, almost as many votes as Trump’s winning margin. To win, Biden would need many of the new residents, as well as inspire more young and Black voters – who make up about one-fifth of the electorate – to turn out.
The pandemic has made organizing and exiting voice efforts more difficult. A virtual ‘watch party’ held at Zoom during last week’s Democratic National Convention lacks the pizzazz of a personal event.
‘I’m so happy to be with you today. I wish I was there physically, ”said Rep. Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Democrat who had considered Biden a running mate before taking on senior Kamala Harris of California.
“I want to be you, surround yourself, but this is the best we can do,” replied Valerie Biden Owens, Joe Biden’s sister and longtime campaign leader. ‘It works pretty darn. … We rock it. “
The campaign said the Zoom call drew hundreds of people, but it is unclear if it helped increase enthusiasm for Biden.
“The key group in this election is still people who are democratically paid but do not like Biden,” said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, a national Democratic company based in the state.
Brandy Allen, a 27-year-old on a lunch break from her job as a cashier at a Harris Teeter supermarket, said she did not vote in 2016 but plans to see it this time.
Allen said the recent death of civil rights leader John Lewis had inspired her, but said she had not heard much from the Biden campaign as the Democratic Party, despite her interest in health care and the environment.
“I do not know if I saw them reach out to us,” said Allen, who is black.
Michael Whatley, chairman of the state GOP, said he has sent floors urging voters to register for absentee ballots and has instructed county officials to trust voters that the system is safe, despite Trump’s unfounded accusations that post-in-vote will lead to rampant fraud.
Whatley blames the state’s economic woes – 8.5% unemployment in July – on Cooper’s cautious approach to the pandemic. But Cooper has proved popular, and most polls show a majority of voters blame Trump’s failures of the coronavirus country.
Robert Farrow, left, a retiree who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, plans to vote for President Trump this year. He is sitting with his friend Dean Patton in Cary, NC, after having coffee at a bagel shop.
(Noah Bierman / Los Angeles Times)
Trump hopes voters will review his perceived failure, and that enough white conservatives will help him keep the state.
Robert Farrow, a 78-year-old retiree who moved from Ventura to Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, six years ago, said he would probably “hold my nose” and vote for Trump, despite concerns about the president’s character. In 2016, he voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson, for the first time in his life that he failed to vote for a Republican presidential candidate, he said.
“We are voting for a commander in chief,” he said, explaining why he is with Trump this time. “Not a preacher.”
