You can drive through the heart of North Carolina without seeing much evidence of election season on the telegraph polls or yard signs. But on television, the advertising is relentless, hostile towards the opposition – and expensive.
The competing Democratic and Republican parties are expected to spend a combined $360 million (€325 million) in political advertising in North Carolina this year, the 11th highest state spend in the US according to the advertising tracking group, AdImpact. It’s a reflection of a personality-driven election race for the governor’s mansion and also of the Democrats’ gathering belief that they may yet plant a blue flag again in the presidential campaign.
In February of last year, then 25-year-old political activist Anderson Clayton ran for chair of the North Carolina state Democratic Party, challenging the 73-year-old incumbent, Bobbie Richardson. It was an audacious move, given that Richardson had himself made history by becoming the state’s first black chairperson just two years earlier and had the endorsement of the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. But Clayton won by 272 votes to 223, becoming the youngest state party chair in the country.
“Rural areas right now are dying, and people for years have just sat there and said, ‘y’all deserve that’,” she said in an interview with NPR last year at her parent’s home in Roxboro. The attitude was that anyone who chose to live in an area like that deserved “just to die out”, said Clayton, who expressed anger and a sense of being ignored by her party. “I was angry that it was ignoring places like where I’d grown up.”
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North Carolina has more than three million rural constituents, more than any other state apart from Texas.
Roxboro is the county seat in Person County in the north of the state and traditionally an agricultural and textile county of about 40,000 people. It is located within an hour’s drive of the booming Research Triangle near Raleigh. In the last election, 60 per cent of voters there opted for Donald Trump.
With Anderson’s youth came the twin attributes of dynamism and an understanding of how to reach the potential voters her generation, many of whom had tapped out of the political conversation. This year, the North Carolina Democrats will contest 118 of the 120 electoral seats for the state House and all 50 state Senate seats. It reflects an impatience with the assumption that time and demographics would ultimately prevail for the Democrats and lead to the bluing of North Carolina, the belief that with the influx of new professionals to the burgeoning urban centres, the Democrats would ultimately win out.
And it’s an uncertain projection in any case: North Carolina’s coastal community towns have begun to attract more and more retirees, and are becoming a deeper Republican red in voting returns.
Clayton’s other appealing quality is that she believes she is speaking for and to forgotten swathes of North Carolina voters from counties just like her own, people who have struggled to reinvent themselves since the demise of agricultural and manufacturing jobs and feel, as she told NPR, as though they are being punished for wanting to live where they are from.
Ironically, this is the very demographic that has come to feel as though Trump’s reconfigured Republican Party is listening to them.
Wilson County mirrors Person but lies to the south of the Research Triangle and is an attractive alternative to professionals priced out of Raleigh and its neighbouring university towns. A place in transition, Wilson is rural but growing and is home to people with conflicting views on politics and ideals. They share a sense of jadedness with the embittered political arguments and are experiencing the same issues as Americans everywhere: eye-watering rises in living costs and housing; and concerns about education and taxes. And they are united in their belief that there is nowhere that they’d rather live than Wilson.
Stephen Greene, professor of political science at North Carolina State University, told me in a conversation in early June that he couldn’t understand why North Carolina was being pencilled in as a definite Republican win. This was a full six weeks before Joe Biden’s startling exit. As Greene pointed out then, the Democrats had already opened up 11 field offices across the state, many located in rural areas. While Trump won in the state four years ago, he believed this year’s election would come down to fine margins.
It was a prescient call. The entry of Kamala Harris gave the Democratic Party a nationwide surge in optimism and energy after months during which its campaign laboured under a moribund resignation. In North Carolina, the election infrastructure and groundwork laid down by Clayton and her party colleagues was ideally placed to channel that sudden burst of energy.
As a result, things have come first circle. Entire counties in North Carolina that had come to believe they were forgotten by the system suddenly have the attention of both Republicans and Democrats, who are all ears and keen to listen.