Swing state again
The Associated Press had already called the presidential race for Barack Obama that night in November 2008. One state they had not called was mine. After the celebration at our watch party subsided, the TV still showed Sen. John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina. There was only one county of the handful left to report with any quantity of votes in it. Again, mine.
Where was Buncombe?
A friend, a precinct election judge, pushed through the crowd and slid up on my right. He’d just arrived from the Board of Elections office where they’d had a data upload glitch. He shoved a sheaf of printouts into my hand. The tally read 17,000 net votes for Obama. North Carolina just went blue.
That’s a feeling we haven’t revisited since then. Maybe this year.
President Biden’s campaign declared in its earliest days that he had a strong chance of winning North Carolina, even though no Democrat had captured the state since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.
That claim began to look implausible as Mr. Biden plummeted in the polls and Democrats grew anxious about reliably blue states like Minnesota and Virginia.
Now the party has a brand-new candidate in Vice President Kamala Harris and with her, an energized voting base and reshuffled political map. As she visits North Carolina on Friday to lay out her economic agenda, Democrats there are feeling hopeful again about delivering her a state where success has eluded them for 16 years — and where it is unclear if energy will be enough.
The news has omitted N.C. from the list of swing states for months, but Kamala Harris has not ignored it. She’s visited over a half dozen times just this year. She visited again on Friday to roll out her economic vision. Harris has a long history of working with Gov. Roy Cooper. Democrats’ Gen Z state chair, Anderson Clayton, 26, worked rural Iowa for Harris in 2019 before Harris withdrew from the primary. They’ve … met.
There is a definite 2008 vibe in the air here.
Mr. Cooper, a two-term governor who was a contender to serve as Ms. Harris’s running mate, said in an interview that he had not “felt this much excitement” since Mr. Obama’s first White House run, particularly among young people.
“People were concerned about the age of both President Biden and Donald Trump, and now that issue is off the table for Vice President Harris and more squarely on the shoulders of Donald Trump,” said Mr. Cooper, before comparing the race to a basketball game: “We were 12 points behind, and now we’ve made a fast, strong run, and we’ve tied the score.”
Interviews with nearly a dozen other North Carolina leaders and strategists showed that he is far from alone. They pointed to a wave of new volunteers, increased spending on the airwaves and tightening poll numbers across the battlegrounds.
Polls since Harris’s ascendance show N.C. is in play. The Cook Political Report on Wednesday found Harris in a statistical tie with Trump.
Republicans cited by the Times suggest Harris has a steep hill to climb with independent voters in the state (38%). They’re not wrong. Statewide, independents vote against Democrats by about 58%. But they vote less, 6.5 percent less. Should Democrats turn out more left-leaning independents this year in hundreds of blue, city precincts, they could shave Republicans’ advantage.
Plus the state’s governor’s race is the most closely watched ion the nation:
Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general, is running against Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor. Democrats have aimed to connect Mr. Robinson, who has a history of offensive and incendiary remarks, to Mr. Trump.
Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director for the Harris campaign, said the views of candidates like Mr. Robinson would energize Democrats and alienate suburban voters, independents and moderate Republicans up and down the ticket.
A recent poll by Carolina Forward shows Stein up by a full 10 points. Harris could benefit from Stein’s coattails.
Post by @kamalahqView on Threads
Veteran campaign operative Thomas Mills cautions against trusting polls, but watches trends. He believes Mark “some people need killing” Robinson’s campaign is collapsing. Ads attacking him use his own words:
He tells voters, on video and in writing, that he’s extreme, that he’s divisive, that he lacks respect for certain people he’s supposed to represent, and that he lacks the temperament to serve as governor. I suspect he’ll join the list of Republicans too extreme to win competitive races, people like Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell and Todd “legitimate rape” Akins whose own words sank their campaigns.
May Trump be so lucky.
It’s MAGA weirdness all the way down ballot here. Rep. Dan Bishop, the Republican running for attorney general sponsored North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill.” Michele Morrow, the GOP’s home-schooling candidate for superintendent of public instruction, attended Trump’s Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally. She called for the mass arrest “of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election.” And if the police and the Department of Justice refused, Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act which, Morrow said, ”completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”
As far as their love for the Constitution goes, these candidates have adopted an abusive spouse’s definition. Whether they are gifts that keep on giving we’ll know on November 5.
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