Harris faces N.C. voters skeptical of a promised tech boom

Residents of this town about 25 miles east of Charlotte say all the upcoming jobs in the world can’t help them right now as they suffer from inflation, which they blame on the Biden administration.

“I don’t feel like anything is going to change,” said Hailey Wilson, 32, of a potential Harris presidency. She lives a short drive from the Corning factory in a trailer with her husband and their three children. She planned to vote for former president Donald Trump, she said, mostly because of higher prices but also because she’s skeptical of Biden’s promise of high-tech jobs for places like Midland. She isn’t convinced Harris would be any better.

Whether Harris manages to distinguish herself from President Joe Biden’s unpopular economic record will be key to her success in states like North Carolina, which is in play again as polls remain unclear. The swing state has only gone blue twice in a presidential election since 1968, but local Democratic organizers say this could be their year.

Harris is scheduled to deliver a speech Friday in Raleigh, the state’s capital, focused on her plan to lower costs for middle-class families and her pledge to take on price gouging by corporations “on Day One.”

Her planned approach is an acknowledgment that the economy looms large for voters in North Carolina and across the nation. Researchers at East Carolina University this year found that inflation is the top issue raised by voters in the state. An Ipsos poll released last week reported that 41 percent of U.S. adults trusted Trump more on “the economy, inflation and jobs” while 32 percent trusted Harris more. That disadvantage persists in the face of research suggesting that Trump’s proposed policies, such as new import tariffs, would probably exacerbate inflation.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said Trump had the “worst jobs record of any president in modern history,” while saying the Biden-Harris administration had delivered record-low unemployment and 16 million new jobs.

Trump criticized the Biden administration over inflation in a conversation with Elon Musk on Monday. “We’ve got to get the prices down,” he said.

Democratic leaders have hoped Biden’s massive infrastructure programs would win over voters in red areas like Midland, where many factories slated to benefit are located. But construction projects have not come quickly enough to move the needle for this election.

Lofty plans

Connecting every household to high-speed internet has been a centerpiece for the Biden White House, often compared to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s push to bring electricity to every house and farm across 1930s America.

The Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, or BEAD, is meant to ensure residents in rural areas have stable, speedy internet. It also aims to help domestic manufacturers, since it requires that much of the equipment be made in the United States.

Harris has crisscrossed the country to promote the program. Last summer, she traveled to Wisconsin to announce a new Nokia factory that will create 200 jobs and help supply the new BEAD networks.

“President Joe Biden and I decided to run for office because we believed it was time to fix this and to bring manufacturing jobs back,” Harris said at the time.

Yet the BEAD program is not moving quickly enough for voters to see a jobs explosion in time for the election. It’s been a challenge for each state to plan new networks that reach every household. Officials at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, have also been wary of sending billions of dollars in grants out the door without thorough vetting, lest they be accused of mismanaging taxpayer dollars.

“The truth is we’re 10 percent of the way through the process,” said George Notter, an equity analyst at Jefferies, who forecasts that no BEAD orders will be placed this year with suppliers and that much of the orders won’t arrive until 2026.

Republicans have seized on the issue. Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr posts a running tally on X, which on Tuesday read: “Today, over 1,000 days after the plan was enacted: 0 People have been connected to the Internet with that $ 0 Projects underway.”

NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson defended the program’s rollout in an interview, saying the agency was moving at the pace set out by Congress and has approved more than half of the states’ plans. “There’s a steady cadence,” he said. “Ultimately, it is a multiyear program.”

Davidson said other smaller programs have already begun hooking up rural residents to high-speed internet.

“Out in the world, people are seeing this,” he said. “It’s not necessarily something that shows up in a poll.”

Democratic organizers in North Carolina argue that even if the infrastructure jobs are in the pipeline, voters are fired up over other issues. Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, says she’s heard many voters concerned about abortion access in the state.

“I definitely felt a shift in the magnitude of how excited this base is,” she said of Harris’s nomination.

Sold for scrap

New York-based Corning made its name manufacturing lightbulbs and baking dishes. But the company also invented fiber-optic cables in 1970, glass threads that transmit data with beams of light. The sector has seen booms and busts since, which is why some Midland residents are wary of counting on BEAD until it happens.

In the late 1990s, Corning started building the $600 million fiber-optic factory in Midland, sparking excitement about an economic renaissance.

But just as the plant began to ramp up production in 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. Snowed under mounting losses, Corning shuttered the fledgling factory in 2002 and laid off nearly all 550 workers. Darren Hartsell, Midland’s mayor pro tem, recalled the company selling parts of the facility as scrap steel.

“It just dwindled from the excitement, and people getting jobs that were from here, to laid off and nothing to do,” he said.

The Midland factory didn’t reopen until 2008, with a limited workforce. By then, Corning had moved to globalize, building manufacturing bases around the world. Following a clash with China’s government, Corning announced expanded production in Shanghai to help smooth relations in what was quickly becoming the world’s largest optical fiber market.

Even if its slow to get going, BEAD is the most exciting thing to happen to the fiber-optics industry in a long time: Its domestic production requirement is set to create a sales boom for made-in-USA equipment.

Bolton, the Fiber Broadband Association president, said he expects the program to catapult North America past China to become the world’s largest fiber market in 2026, for the first time in over a decade. “I never thought I’d see that,” he said.

Suppliers have scrambled to build new U.S. factories to compete for orders. Corning announced last year that it is opening a new factory in Hickory, N.C. — an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Midland — that will apply protective coatings on the fiber produced in Midland.

The company says it’s invested over $500 million since 2020 in new fiber and cable capacity, most of it in the United States, in anticipation of elevated demand.

Corning CEO Wendell Weeks said the company was proud to support factory jobs in North Carolina.

“That’s why we do what we do,” he said, “is being able to give our folks on the floor the type of jobs you can build a whole life around.”

But Weeks also said Corning, which has optical fiber factories abroad, including in Poland and China, is keeping most of its manufacturing international.

“It’s our values that we will make in the region where our customers are,” he said.

Corning reduced its global head count of 50,000 by 1,000 in January because of broader economic headwinds. The company declined to say if it expects its head count to surpass 2023 levels once the BEAD orders come in.

Gold rush

On a hot Saturday afternoon, a few miles north of the Corning factory, starry-eyed amateur prospectors shake their pans in Midland’s Little Meadow Creek, squinting for a glint of gold.

Midland recorded the first gold find in U.S. history, when the son of farmer John Reed pulled a sparkling rock out of the water here in 1799, soon sparking a gold rush.

North Carolina gold mining has long since faded into history. Midland’s best shot at another boom is probably in fiber, but it’s unclear how much U.S. production is sustainable.

Local residents cite some signs of progress, such as the first Starbucks coming to town.

“I think it has to be pretty up-and-coming for a Starbucks to be here,” said Carsen McKeel, 29, glassmaking operations section supervisor at the Corning factory who says she likes the shaken espressos with brown sugar and oat milk.

Gary Muller, an executive dean at the Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, which sends students to Corning apprenticeships, said there was “momentary softness” in local manufacturing, but he was optimistic longer-term.

“It will be an opportunity for people in our community to gain skills that will make them even more employable than they are today,” he said.

Not everyone is convinced.

“Ninety percent of those jobs are for people that’s got two- to four-year degrees, you know, not for the average American out here that’s just trying to get a job to make ends meet,” said James McAdams, 61, a paper company supervisor in Hickory. He said that Harris is “even worse than Biden” on issues like the border and that he will be voting for Trump.

Hartsell, Midland’s interim mayor, said the Biden White House’s promise of high-tech jobs has a long way to go to win over residents, who are mostly worried about inflation.

The median home price in Cabarrus County is $408,000, more than $150,000 higher than five years ago, according to Redfin. Incomes have risen more slowly: Median household income for the county was $79,000 in 2022, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, up from $61,500 five years earlier.

“That’s just not a whole heck of a lot of money,” Hartsell said. “We see people struggle to pay power bills. We see people struggle to put gas in their car.” It would probably take more than ramped-up production at Corning to meet those challenges.

Emily Guskin and Scott Clement contributed to this report.