The Harris campaign hopes North Carolina will finally deliver
DAVID JOHNSON fears his neighbour is a socialist. As a retiree he volunteers with his local Republican Party in Johnston County, a patch of North Carolina where pristine suburban streets yield to rambling country roads. The neighbour in question has put up a Black Lives Matter sign and Mr Johnson says she has accused him of being a white supremacist, which he denies. “She’s from Delaware,” he says. “Make of that what you will.”
North Carolina will start distributing absentee ballots on September 6th, and as early voting begins, Johnston County is an unlikely battleground. Republican candidates for president have won the last 11 contests here, often handily. Yet Democrats increasingly see this part of the state as contested territory. Population growth in exurban counties and the state’s peculiar political demography mean that Democrats cannot afford to overlook small towns and the countryside, while Republicans can no longer take them for granted.
North Carolina only recently joined the list of swing states rated by nonpartisan analysts as toss-ups in November’s presidential vote. (The others are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.) Joe Biden’s decision to step aside and Kamala Harris’s ascension put the state in play. Where Mr Biden once trailed Donald Trump by seven points, Ms Harris now appears to be roughly tied.
Yet North Carolina—an enticing prize with 16 electoral votes—has repeatedly teased and disappointed Democrats. The party’s nominees have lost the state in ten of the past 11 presidential elections. But North Carolina reliably elects Democrats to statewide offices. The party has controlled the governor’s mansion for 28 of the past 32 years, for example, and in 2020, Governor Roy Cooper attracted 150,000 more votes than Mr Biden. Mr Cooper’s local roots and tailored brand of moderate politics probably explain that vote gap.
His success and that of other state Democrats feeds the party’s optimism despite the dismal record in presidential races. Demographic currents do seem to strongly favour the party’s multi-racial and college-educated coalition. In 1990 North Carolina was 75% white. Three decades later the figure is 60%. It is one of the most educated states in the south, and of the small number of swing states this year it has the highest share of college-educated residents. Still, “If demography is destiny, that destiny is arriving at a much slower pace than many people had hoped,” says Asher Hildebrand, a professor of public policy at Duke University.
One reason is the state’s “multi-directional” political evolution, as Mr Hildebrand describes it. Contrast North Carolina with its southern neighbour Georgia, which unexpectedly veered left in 2020. African-American voters buoy the Democratic coalition in the South, and nearly a third of Georgians are black. This compares with only a fifth of North Carolinians. And while nearly three-quarters of Georgia’s population growth since 1990 has been in Atlanta, only 40% of North Carolina’s has occurred in Charlotte, the state’s largest city. The people moving to North Carolina are not just young, diverse urbanites, but also Republican-leaning retirees and military veterans. The electorate’s expansion, Mr Hildebrand sums up, “is all over the place, and that has the effect of muting the overall trend left”.
Some of the fastest-growing counties are in exurban areas. They help Republicans answer Democrats’ advantages in the cities and increasingly the suburbs. In JoCo, as locals call Johnston County, Republican presidential candidates easily carry the jurisdiction. But population growth has made JoCo relevant to both parties. For Democrats, holding down their opponent’s net margin in an expanding Republican stronghold is worth just as much as running up the score with their own base.
Sharon Castleberry, the Democratic Party chair of Johnston County, is the local architect of this approach. A fifth-generation Johnstonian, she grew up helping out on her family’s tobacco farm. These days she pores over voter-registration data. She thinks Democrats are holding their own since Mr Biden yielded to Ms Harris. In the month after that pivot point, “we were pretty even with Republicans in terms of new registrations,” she notes.
If Republicans and Democrats agree on one thing, it is that Democrats cannot win North Carolina in urban and suburban areas alone. Rather, “you have to go west of 77 and east of 95 to win,” says Matt Mercer of the North Carolina Republican Party, referring to two highways that bookend Charlotte and Raleigh, the prosperous cities in the state’s centre.
Under Anderson Clayton, a rural North Carolinian, the state’s Democratic Party has organised in areas beyond cities and suburbs. About half of the Harris campaign’s field offices are in exurban and rural regions. “They’re welcome to go into all of North Carolina,” says Mr Mercer, “which they seem to have an aversion to.” He is adamant that all this effort by his opponents will merely lead to more Democratic disillusionment come November. ■
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