Dem
48
GOP
52
Ever since 2008, when Barack Obama won North Carolina, Democrats have dreamed of turning the state blue, just like they did its neighbor to the north, Virginia. And by the same mechanism: migration to the state of college-educated professionals, to NoVa in Virginia and to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. But although it is always very close, Democrats can't seem to get that last 1%. Why?
Western North Carolina used to have thriving textile and furniture industries, but they are long gone. But Davidson County and the surrounding areas have had a revival. An Austrian company opened a $700 million particle board factory in 2018. Nucor Steel is building a $350 million plant. Toyota is finishing an $8 billion battery plant. And Siemens is going to make passenger railroad cars there. It is a rebirth of the area and serves as a counterbalance to the growth in Charlotte's Mecklenburg County and Raleigh's Wake County. All of those factories attract blue-collar workers, who bring their political views with them, just as do the white-collar professionals in the Triangle. Why is it so successful? It is partly due to low taxes, cheap land, and I-85, which gets products all over the Southeast, and plenty of workers who are used to factory jobs.
But the balance of power may be held by counties on the fringe of urban areas, so far out that few Democrats want to move there. The local politicians call them "countrypolitan counties." The voter rolls are growing faster than the populations there, presumably because Donald Trump got people to register for the first time.
Donald Trump sees the area as prime MAGA territory. He has saturated Davidson and surrounding counties with ads designed to get conservatives worked up into a rage. Many of the ads are largely about Kamala Harris' 2019 position supporting taxpayer-funded gender-confirming surgery for prisoners. The number of prisoners requesting such surgery is microscopic and the cost to each taxpayer is maybe a penny or two, but it gets everyone's blood boiling. Trump is a genius at getting people very angry about issues that do not affect their lives in any way and making them forget issues that affect them big time.
The DNC is aware of all this and is fighting back. It is running ads narrated by DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison. He notes that he is from a small town in South Carolina and says that Harris wants to help people in small rural towns—for example, by fighting to keep rural hospitals running.
Both Harris and Trump realize that North Carolina could go either way and both are ending their campaigns spending a lot of time in the state. They have both been there this past weekend and will make appearances there today as well. Trump's rallies have been in Gastonia, Greensboro, and Kinston, with one in Raleigh today. He has been in the state nine times so far and his running mate J.D. Vance has been there six times. Harris is focusing on Charlotte. The fact that both campaigns are putting so much effort into the state until the last possible minute indicates that both of them think it will be really close.
One big question mark is the effect of Hurricane Helene, which caused massive damage to roads and infrastructure in the conservative western part of the state, where many Trump voters are. It didn't cause much damage in the Triangle, where many Harris voters live, but the overall effect won't be known until the county-by-county results are in. If many people in the western part of the state can't get to the polls because the roads were washed out, it could be significant. (V)