Wilmington, N.C.
It all comes down to North Carolina.
In the final days of the 2016 election, the Tar Heel State has become the center of the political universe. There are more competitive races here than in perhaps any other presidential swing state: Republican senator Richard Burr is fighting to retain his seat, as is the GOP governor, Pat McCrory. McCrory’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, is leaving open the attorney general post he’s held for 16 years—giving Republicans a chance to steal away a coveted statewide elected office. To get a sense of how politics is dominating life in North Carolina, just turn on the TV: During one hour of Friday evening’s local news broadcast in Raleigh, nearly every single ad was on behalf of a political candidate or PAC.
On top of it all, of course, is the razor-thin presidential race. Both campaigns have made North Carolina a priority in the final days of the campaign. For the Democrats, that included a Thursday rally with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Raleigh and a Friday stop by President Obama in Fayetteville near Fort Bragg. Clinton will also hold her final rally before Election Day late Monday night in Raleigh. On the Republican side, Donald Trump rallied in Selma near Raleigh on Thursday as well as his Saturday fly-in rally in Wilmington. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, made an appearance in Greenville on Friday, and Trump returned a final time Monday for an event in Raleigh.
“North Carolina’s going to lead us to a great, great victory all across the United States of America,” Pence proclaimed in Greenville.
That great victory’s far from a sure thing. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Trump has a one-point lead here. The final Quinnipiac poll of North Carolina found Clinton with a two-point lead, while the final New York Times poll found the race is tied. In other words, it’s the definition of a toss-up. Why? There are a couple reasons.
One is down-ballot: The gubernatorial race has attracted national attention after McCrory, the Republican, backed the state’s bill barring transgendered access to government-managed restrooms designated for the opposite sex. The bill, which McCrory signed into law this year, earned the scorn of liberals and could very well provide Democrats with some enthusiasm to improve turnout. Cooper, the Democratic challenger, has consistently led McCrory since the end of the summer, but the Republican governor has won some of his reputation back following his response to Hurricane Matthew’s devastation. McCrory likes to note on the stump that Cooper has criticized Republicans for “building up” the state’s rainy-day fund instead of spending the surplus on government programs.
“We did not spend everything we had, and you know what happened? It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained,” McCrory said in Wilmington, at the southern end of the Carolina coast hit hard by Matthew earlier this fall.
Another reason is the unpredictability of the electorate here. Reliably Republican for decades, North Carolina went for Barack Obama in 2008 before Mitt Romney was able to take the state back for the GOP in 2012. There’s no reason to think the state is particularly ripe for Clinton—it didn’t vote for Bill Clinton in either of his White House bids, for instance. Black turnout was high enough to give Obama the state in 2008 but it wasn’t enough to keep the state in his column four years later. Early voting in North Carolina, which ended on Saturday, gives a good sense of how volatile the race is there: In 2012, the black share of the early vote was 29 percent, and the conventional wisdom is that Clinton could be reassured of her ability to win there if that repeated itself in 2016. But according to the state’s early voting totals, just under 24 percent of the early voting electorate was black.
The issues aren’t great for Democrats either, particularly Obamacare. North Carolina has seen some of the biggest rate hikes and highest premiums in the country for its Obamacare plans. There’s a reason that Trump mentioned “repealing and replacing” Obamacare before anything else in his speech in Wilmington.
But North Carolina is also changing, and changing rapidly. Joe Stewart, the executive director at the pro-business, nonpartisan North Carolina FreeEnterprise Foundation, says North Carolina is at a “transitional moment” because of three factors: diversification, urbanization, and “young-ification.” The state is more diverse, not just ethnically—just 54 percent of eligible voters in North Carolina were born there, right beneath the national average of 56 percent for native-born voters in their state. North Carolina’s population is increasingly living in what Stewart calls the “city of Charleigh”—a band of conurbations stretching from Charlotte to Raleigh along the Interstate 85 corridor. And coming to live in Charleigh as part of its highly-skilled workforce are young, college-educated people.
The big question: Is this young, more urban, more diverse electorate vote large enough to tip North Carolina to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats? Or, put another way, does rural, white North Carolina still have the power and numbers to keep the state in the GOP column? Speaking to an almost entirely white crowd in Wilmington—a coastal city in the state’s rural eastern region, far from Charleigh—Trump’s wife, the Slovenian-born model Melania, offered a somewhat dire reason for frustrated Americans to vote for her husband: “This is your last chance to make a change,” she said.
That’s almost certainly not true. But it may be the last chance for Republicans to try to win an election in North Carolina, and nationwide, by maximizing the overall declining share of white, rural, non-college-educated Americans.
