CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Selecting Charlotte, North Carolina, as the host city for the 2020 Republican National Convention signals the importance of the swing state to President Trump’s reelection.
With the party’s top brass in town for scaled-back in-person meetings and a convention roll-call vote, North Carolina GOP officials are outwardly confident about Trump’s reelection prospects, as is almost every Republican delegate and staff member in Charlotte.
But Republicans in the state voiced some concerns that reveal vulnerabilities in the president’s path to carrying the state’s 15 electoral votes on Nov. 3.
“The enthusiasm for the president and top of the ticket is off the chart,” said GOP state party Chairman Michael Whatley. “The polling that we’ve seen across the state has us, you know, in a really good space.”
North Carolina Republicans have 10,000 volunteers, who, in tandem with paid aides, have contacted potential voters in the state 4 million times this cycle, according to Whatley. Campaigning was largely virtual between February and May but has since widened to include door-knocking by those who feel comfortable with that tactic, he said.
A consternation for Whatley, though, is whether Trump supporters would vote Republican down the ballot.
“We’ve also got a very liberal 6-to-1 Democrat majority on the Supreme Court. We’ve got some important races there, and so, we want to make sure that people go all the way down the ticket,” he said.
The growth of liberal centers in the Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham areas means that key statewide offices often flip control, a reality that could pose a problem for Trump as well.
Great gobs of organizing power and money are being thrown at North Carolina not only because of its Electoral College significance but because Democrats are hoping to replace Republican Sen. Thom Tillis with Cal Cunningham, while the GOP want Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper out of office in favor of Lt. Gov. Dan Forest.
Emotions flared up at the mention of Cooper, who sparred with Republicans for weeks over whether or not they could host a full convention, with allegations that he was leveraging the coronavirus-related lockdowns as a political tool.
“I think he’s kept it on lockdown for political reasons, his race mainly,” said Kyshia Lineberger, GOP national committeewoman for North Carolina. “He’s playing political games in Raleigh.”
Whatley blamed Cooper for the state’s stalled economic recovery, which could damage voters’ views of Trump’s management of the economy, a central motivating metric.
John Steward, a North Carolina convention delegate, said the gubernatorial contest had always been “a hard nut to crack for Republicans,” citing staunchly conservative former Sen. Jesse Helms and the state’s penchant for ticket-splitting.
“There were years when we would elect Jesse Helms and, at the same time, vote for Jim Hunt for governor, who was a very liberal governor,” he said. “The Senate race, I’m pretty confident in Thom Tillis winning.”
For Steward, North Carolina would be “a tough close race” at the presidential level, its weight underscored by Charlotte “making history because it was going to host two national conventions within 10 years.”
Election prognosticators agree that North Carolina is a toss-up. Trump is ahead of 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the state by an average of 0.6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics polling data. Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight gives Biden a 1.3-point advantage.
On the eve of the Republican convention, the Biden campaign released a new ad called “Trump’s Boycott,” which features a manufacturing plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to compare the contenders’ commitment to jobs. The spot will complement ads already on the air in the state next week as part of a national $24 million media buy.
But Trump isn’t letting his position in North Carolina go undefended. He’ll be near Asheville on Monday after visiting Charlotte, where 336 Republican convention delegates will vote to renominate him and Vice President Mike Pence as the 2020 party standard-bearers.
Trump won North Carolina in 2016 over then-Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by almost 4 points, but each of them underperformed their predecessors. In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney beat President Barack Obama by 2 points. North Carolina voted for Obama four years earlier in 2008 over GOP standard-bearer John McCain by a margin of 0.32%. Before Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate had not experienced victory in the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
