It Could All Come Down to North Carolina

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North Carolina has voted for a Democratic president only once since the 1970s. But the party’s dream to flip the state never dies—and in fact, could be realized this year. Polls show that the presidential race in North Carolina is dead even, and Democrats are making a massive effort to reach more rural voters. “Doug Emhoff should just get a pied-à-terre here, at this point,” says David Graham, an Atlantic political writer who lives in Durham, North Carolina. Donald Trump can’t win without the state. And if Vice President Kamala Harris loses Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, she’ll need North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes.

In this week’s Radio Atlantic, we do a deep dive into North Carolina politics, culture, and scandals with Graham and the Atlantic senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, who grew up in Rocky Mount. If the state goes for Harris, will it feel more solidly new South? And could our national election really turn on a local scandal and a tragic flood?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There’s a direction to American presidential elections. We spend months thinking about the big topics: democracy, the economy, immigration, wars abroad, culture wars at home. But as the election gets closer, our focus starts to narrow. We wonder less about what Americans are thinking and more about what Pennsylvanians and Arizonans are thinking.

And then we start to wonder about what people in Allegheny County or Maricopa County are thinking. And the tighter the polls are, the further down we go. And it is tight right now. It’s close over about half a dozen swing states. But the closest of all of them and one that has a very good chance of being what pollsters call the tipping point—meaning, the state that could decide the election—is North Carolina.

Rosin: Donald Trump almost certainly can’t win the White House without North Carolina. And if Vice President Harris loses Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, she’ll almost certainly need this state.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, we’re talking about North Carolina.

We’re not used to this state deciding presidential elections. With the exception of Obama’s 2008 run, Democratic candidates haven’t won there since the 1970s.

Rosin: That’s staff writer David Graham. He writes about politics, and he lives in Durham, North Carolina. And he means an omen because, like a lot of southern states, the demographics of North Carolina are changing.

Rosin: And that’s senior editor Vann Newkirk, who is a native of Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

I started our conversation by asking David why Democrats think they have a shot in a place they’ve rarely won in the past half century.

Graham: You know, Democrats look at the demographics, and they keep thinking they can win, and they keep coming really close but not close enough. So they came really close in 2020. Trump won by 1.3 percent. They came really close in some Senate elections, but they just can’t quite seal the deal.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And, Vann, what are the shifting demographics? Like, as someone who’s watched the state for a long time, we hear a lot about Democratic shifts in southern states like Georgia. On the ground, what’s shifting in North Carolina?

Newkirk: So I’d say the thing that’s changed is you’ve had a whole lot of transplants. North Carolina’s always had a lot of folks who’ve come from out of state, and a lot of those people are coming from northern cities, especially. They’re moving to places like Durham, like Charlotte, like Cary (the “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees”).

Graham: (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.) Is that an inside North Carolinian joke?

Graham: I was wondering who was going to say it.

Newkirk: Yeah. They’re a constant part of the population growth of the state. And also, the state is getting a little bit younger. There’s always been a strong contingent of Latino immigrants, as well, who are moving into the state. And so what you see is, over time, an electorate that is becoming sort of less similar to some of the other southern states. So you’ve got a younger population. You’ve got a really strong contingent of Black voters in the East. And you have a lot more liberal, suburban white voters.

Rosin: The thing that I keep reading about, in addition to everything you just said, is that it has a higher percentage of Black voters and a huge rural population. How do you read that? Because the way people talk about that, it’s as if those things are opposites. Like, one favors the Democrats—you know, the higher percentage of Black voters—and one favors the Republicans, the big rural population. Is that a correct reading of the demographics?

Newkirk: Not quite. So when a lot of people say rural voters, they tend to mean “white voters.” And when people think Black voters, they like to think about the quote-unquote “inner city.”

That’s not exactly how North Carolina works. So yes—there are really strong concentrations of Black voters in the big cities in North Carolina. So Charlotte, Durham, Raleigh, Greensboro—these are places that have lots of Black voters. But also, there are several counties where Black voters are close to the majority in the eastern part of the state.

These are rural counties. So traditionally, when Democrats have come to North Carolina, the places they’ve campaigned for Black votes have been this really bifurcated approach. They go through the center, where the big cities are, and then they campaign out in the East.

Rosin: So, David, we’ve been talking about demographics and population shifts and how Democrats have come close many years but not quite. When you look at 2024, what do you see? Is anything different from years past?

Graham: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a few things to watch. Democrats have to continue to win the places they’ve won. They’re trying to drive up their margins in rural areas. So you’ve seen, you know, national figures going to these rural counties. There’s also a new chair of the state Democratic Party who’s 26 years old. She is from a rural county, and she’s really made her whole thing: She’s going to go to those counties. The party is going to compete in those places.

And, you know, you get these suburban areas. There’s a guy who I’ve quoted before, Mac McCorkle, who’s a Democratic strategist and teaches at Duke. He calls them “country-politan”—

Newkirk: (Laughs.)

Graham: —that are sort of suburbs but have a sort of rural heritage. And these places are—they’re kind of the outer rings around Charlotte and around Raleigh. And those are places where Democrats have been really trying to sort of cut down the margins, to lose by less, basically—like, to get to 40 percent, maybe.

And then the last thing is Charlotte’s county, Mecklenburg County, is huge. And people keep talking about Mecklenburg turnout being broken. So Democrats need to get voters out there. And if they get voters out there, they have a decent chance of winning. And if they don’t, they’re cooked.

Rosin: Whenever we have conversations like this, I’m always reminded and amazed, like, how local—like, we think about these giant, national issues, and the thing that’s going to decide the election is democracy or abortion, when the thing that could decide the election is a 26-year-old who decides to get Democrats to do a different plea in Meckle…burg County. I don’t even know—Mecklen?

Graham: Mecklenburg.

Newkirk: Mecklenburg.

Rosin: Mecklenburg County. Sorry about that. Right. So it’s, like, the smallest, smallest thing, you know? That’s why I love talking about specific states. It’s like, the smallest thing can turn the big thing.

Newkirk: Yeah. Well, especially in a place where the margins are so thin. You know, you’re talking 2008—what was that? Ten thousand or 14,000 votes, David?

Graham: 14,000.

Newkirk: 14,000. Okay. Yeah. That is a good-sized high-school football game.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Newkirk: Like, that’s the margin.

Graham: Seventy-five thousand in 2020. In 2016, the governor’s race just decided by, like, 10,030 or something ridiculous like that. I mean, these are tiny margins. Cheri Beasley was the chief justice of the state supreme court, ran for reelection and lost by 401 votes.

Newkirk: Lost by 400. Yeah. Yeah.

Rosin: Right Right. Right. What’s the analogy there? It’s like an Atlantic holiday party. No. Not quite. We don’t have 400 people.

Graham: With plus-ones. (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. With plus-ones, maybe. Amazing. But we should talk about what the Democrats are actually doing. Like, what do the Harris campaign’s efforts look like on the ground?

Graham: I mean, they are here all the time. Part of that is that they have a lot of surrogates coming in. You know, Harris has visited. Doug Emhoff should just get a pied-à-terre here, at this point. Tim Walz has been here. Gwen Walz, I believe, has been here. Josh Shapiro has been here. Wes Moore has been here. Jaime Harrison has been here, the chair of the DNC.

And just a lot of grassroots events. You know, they’re out canvassing. They’re training people. They’re doing all the sort of ground-game things that you expect from a well-funded and organized campaign. And I think what’s different is they’re doing more of that in rural areas instead of concentrating it just in the big cities.

Rosin: Vann, as a person who knows North Carolina—and rural North Carolina—what do you think of that effort? Like, how does that strike you as someone who knows the place well? Democrats actually making that effort and going in and knocking on the doors or whatever it is they’re doing. Giving speeches, going places where, apparently, people don’t usually bother to go.

Newkirk: Well, you know, I think people actually do tend to like and appreciate a little pandering. So when people come in and get a nice photo op of them with a Cook Out cup, that actually makes its way to the group chats and sort of seeds the idea of voting for Harris. And that, actually—that’s sort of part of the strategy.

Graham: Vann, can you explain Cook Out for the unenlightened?

Newkirk: So, Cook Out—it is a strikingly inflation-resistant restaurant where you buy trays. You can get a chicken sandwich, a corn dog, chicken nuggets, and fries for, like, $10.

Rosin: And how many times have you done that exact thing?

Newkirk: I cannot count how many Cook Out trays I’ve eaten in my life. I just know that they used to know me at the window.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Newkirk: But I think it does matter. I think, especially now, given that there’s a disaster response and recovery going on, people are going to appreciate the candidates, their surrogates, people in the party making themselves known.

And we’re talking about two different profiles of rural. We’re talking about the rural voter in the East, where they are used to surrogates coming out, especially Black surrogates coming out, going to Souls to the Polls events, going to Black churches and making their speeches.

We’re also talking about mostly white voters in the West who aren’t so used to having Democratic politicians come through and be seen and heard. And I do think banking on at least some of them to be moved by people showing up—that’s probably a good strategy.

Rosin: So just because the outreach to rural North Carolina could become a critical thing in this election, just broadly characterize for us the differences between rural West North Carolina and rural East North Carolina so that when we’re obsessively watching the polls on election night, we understand.

Newkirk: Okay. Well, if you want to make a very rough comparison: Western North Carolina is where the majority of the rural white population lives. Eastern North Carolina is where the majority of the rural Black population lives.

And in eastern North Carolina, there is a very strong, sort of religiously themed and tinged attachment to the Democratic Party among those Black voters. And in western North Carolina, there’s the remnants and the legacy of what we call the Blue Dogs, so the old new South, the very last stronghold, for a long time, of conservative Democratic voters.

Graham: There’s a real belief among Democrats, still, that people are going to keep moving here, and it’s going to become like northern Virginia. Like, the Research Triangle in Charlotte will be like northern Virginia, where they are just such a big sink of votes that Republicans can’t win the state—at least they can’t win the state at a statewide level, even if they can continue to dominate the legislature. And I think that’s an open question, but they’ve been saying that for a long time, and it hasn’t happened yet. So I’ll believe it when I see it.

Newkirk: I do think if Harris were to win North Carolina, that would be, to me, something of a watershed. And number one, it would mean that North Carolina went Democratic for the candidacies of the first two Black people to be president.

And, you know, I think one thing that people will tell you about the South: The biggest constant in voting in the South is what’s called racially polarized voting, which [means] the number-one indicator of who a white voter in the South will vote for is whether Black people like the candidate or not. And this is proven by years and years of elections, of studies.

So if North Carolina becomes the only southern state to go twice for Black candidates in their first time out, I think that is a strong signal that this kind of voting behavior, which, you know, has been the norm in North Carolina, it is fading enough for North Carolina to become a regular part of the Democratic strategy.

Graham: You know, when Vann talks about racial polarization, I think there’s a couple other places we see that showing up in the state. The state is heavily gerrymandered, both at the U.S. House level and at the legislative level. Democrats are going to lose several seats here because of a new map in the U.S. House. And that goes to the question of control of the House.

The legislature is, for the foreseeable future, permanently Republican because of that. And this election—it’s the first general election that we’re going to have a new voter-ID law in place, which is something Republicans in the state have been trying to do since the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision—tied up in litigation for a long time, but it’s now in place. So that may have some effect on the election, as well.

Newkirk: It’s been 11 years since that law first came into play. Eleven.

Graham: I know. (Laughs.) Yeah.

Rosin: You know, we’ve been talking about what’s changing and isn’t changing politically in the state. Hearing you guys talk, I’m also wondering about the possibility of something shifting culturally in North Carolina—like, in a real way, like how it sees itself, how it teaches its own history, you know, what the monuments are like. I mean, maybe this is too much, but I’m just thinking, like, does it go further than just, like, a Democratic strategy?

Graham: I think a lot of that has already happened. You know, a lot of people in the Triangle think of this as being a little bit like Austin, I think in ways that are good and bad.

Rosin: But Austin doesn’t change Texas. Like, Austin is Austin. You know what I mean?

Graham: No, but it’s a change. I mean, Austin sees itself in a very distinctive way, and I think that’s true here. And I mean, you see the people coming in. You see changes in the culture. I think a lot of that stuff has already happened. But what’s interesting, I mean, to your point about monuments, we had several notable cases of sort of vigilante tearing down Confederate monuments and then a real backlash from the conservative General Assembly.

And so I think what defines the state right now is this conflict between this kind of new new-South vision that a lot of people have and a really entrenched conservative power. And no matter what happens in the election, the most powerful person in the state will be the Republican leader of the senate.

Republicans will control the legislature. They’ll control the supreme court. And so there’s going to be this weird push-pull. Both of those things are really present, and they’re both really powerful, and they’re pretty evenly matched.

Newkirk: I think the push-pull is the exact way to describe it. So my hometown, Rocky Mount, I wrote about years ago the Confederate statue that was in the middle of town in Battle Park. And the one where we used to run under when we had track practice—they got rid of it in North Carolina’s own racial reckoning in 2020.

And yet, in the same place, in the same county, there are new restrictions on teaching, say, critical race theory and Black history. The situation is dynamic. It goes back and forth. I don’t think you can say there’s a victor yet.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Right.

Graham: Yeah. You see some states where it seems like, you know, just the state sort of gradually shifts as a whole, and I don’t think that’s true here. I think both of these things are both really present and really strong.

An argument that I’ve sometimes made is that North Carolina was kind of the testing ground for a lot of conservative things. You know, after 2010, the legislature started doing a lot of things that then kind of went national: voter ID, rolling back various laws. Like, we have a racial-justice law. They rolled that back. They started targeting the public universities.

And it was the testing ground for the claims of election fraud. So in the 2016 gubernatorial race, Pat McCrory, the incumbent governor, loses the race by some 10,000 votes and cries fraud. They file all these lawsuits. They keep insisting that there’s massive fraud, and they’re just going to turn up the evidence anytime now. And they don’t. And what eventually happens is: They get tossed out of court. But also, they get defeated, in part, by Republican county board of election chairs who say, This is nonsense. There’s nothing behind this. A Democrat wins the governor’s race.

But you know, once you uncork the lamp and let the genie of doubt out, I think it’s a real problem. And I think, you know, just as we saw that here in 2016, just as we saw in 2020, there are going to be questions about that. Huge portions of the Republican electorate here, as everywhere else, say they don’t believe the 2020 election was fair.

And if Trump loses this election—even if he wins North Carolina and loses his election—you’re going to get people saying they think that it was rigged, and it’s all an inside game.

[Music]

Rosin: All right. So it’s going to be close and possibly contested. And then on top of that, there are two election wildcards we haven’t talked about that are specific to North Carolina: a Republican gubernatorial candidate who’s had so many scandals and a hurricane that’s upended life in the state. Both of those after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So okay—wildcards, now the biggest wildcard, the huge wild card that’s thrown into this race. Do I even have to say his name?

Rosin: And even before the story broke about the Black Nazi comment, Robinson was getting in trouble. For example, his opponent made an ad about some Facebook comments that Robinson made about abortion.

Rosin: Before we talk about his impact on the race, I want to talk about him. David, what are his political roots in the state?

Graham: He’s such a fascinating figure in this way. You know, 10 years ago, this guy was working on a factory floor, which is just unheard of at this kind of level of politics. Blue-collar people don’t run for office, for a lot of reasons—not, you know, any abdication of theirs, but they’re not in the kind of networks. They don’t get recruited. They don’t have the money.

And here’s somebody who’s doing it. So he’s working in a factory, and then in 2018, he goes to speak to the Greensboro City Council because he’s upset about the possible cancellation of a gun show. This is after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Graham: And the speech gets clipped, posted on Facebook by Mark Walker, who’s a U.S. rep from North Carolina. And, like, within days, Robinson is on Fox News. And pretty soon he’s getting recruited to run maybe for Senate, maybe for lieutenant governor. And so he runs the first race he’s ever run—for lieutenant governor in 2020—wins that race, and then plows through a couple of establishment Republican candidates in the primary for governor this year and is the nominee.

Rosin: Is it fair to say his chances are very, very slim?

Graham: I mean, he’s down 15, 17 points in the polls. It’s hard to imagine what would change that. Most of his campaign staff has quit. Most of the staff of his office as lieutenant governor has quit. As you can imagine, it’s hard to recruit quality new staffers when you’re in that kind of situation, especially when your fundraising is drying up, as it is for him. He’s promising to sue CNN for “making things up.” So never say never, but it’s hard to imagine how he bounces back now.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s say Mark Robinson is probably—we can safely say, probably—not going to be the governor of North Carolina. Is there still potential residual effect on the outcome of the election? Like, is there a world where you can say that this outrageous candidate is the reason Kamala Harris is elected president?

Newkirk: Well, I think Democrats hope that it will. But actually, the fact that Robinson is trailing so far actually kind of works against that hope. There is not going to be a tight governor’s race. There are plenty of people who are just fine voting against Mark Robinson, voting for Josh Stein, and voting for Donald Trump.

And I think that is kind of already baked into a lot of people’s calculus about the election. I can’t think of the voters now who are gonna go and, because of Mark Robinson, say, I don’t know about that Trump guy. It’s kind of just hard to game out who those voters are.

Graham: I think the rosy Democratic case is that this drives down Republican enthusiasm, and Republicans stay home because they’re so turned off by this race. And also, you see Democrats really trying to tie Robinson and Trump together.

So Harris has ads up here. You know, they have footage of Trump saying that Robinson is like “Martin Luther King on steroids” and so on and so forth. So she’s trying to really explicitly tie them together.

Rosin: Vann, do you find any cultural roots for him? Like, do you have any way of reading him that’s different than “he comes out of nowhere and pops into the political scene”?

Newkirk: Well, I think he does. Up to a point, he fits in a tradition of Black conservatism in the state. There are quite a few Black conservative voters, especially those who come out of a similar background.

He is from Greensboro, which is one of these nodes on the Black Belt in North Carolina. He spent time in the military. I know quite a few Black conservatives who are rooted in the church, who also have military backgrounds, and who may have spent time in Greensboro. But I think that is kind of where the similarities end.

You know, he gets so much of his language from the online right. And he kind of marries it with that story of being from a tough situation, a very legible story of overcoming. He marries that with this trollish language from online.

Graham: I think that’s exactly right. He sounds like that because he was that for so long. Like, he was just a dude posting views on Facebook. And when you read them, it reads like it’s provocation. Like, part of it is things believes, but he’s also trying to get a rise out of people, including getting a rise out of the people who are friends with him on Facebook.

And related to that, he’s a huge pro-wrestling fan. There’s a whole chapter-length digression in his memoir about pro wrestling. He cites it. He posts about it. And I think that kind of theater and drama is very much a piece of how he approaches oratory and how he approaches politics.

Rosin: Well, that’s the thing that I thought was maybe not dismissible. He’s obviously anomalous. He’s out there. I was thinking, A candidate like him 10 years ago would have gotten nowhere the way he talks. But now, largely because of Trump, there’s a sort of deeply online, provocative way of being as a politician.

Graham: Well, I think it’s an interesting question how somebody like this plays if he’s running for, like, House or even Senate. I mean, we have, you know—look at Matt Gaetz. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene. There are people like this. I think part of the problem is that your governor has to actually do things, and I think that’s a little bit scary to voters.

Like, they’ll take some provocation from a random House member, but it’s a different thing when you’re relying on this guy to, I don’t know, deal with a massive natural disaster, like a hurricane.

Rosin: Right. So since you mention it, we should discuss Hurricane Helene. Vann, I know you have some experience with how a place shifts in the aftermath of a disaster like that. How does it shift?

Newkirk: So Hurricane Helene—it did, it is doing a number on the western part of the state right now. As soon as I got the alerts that it was heading towards the mountains, I had flashbacks to 2016.

So 2016, around the exact same time of an election year, Hurricane Matthew hit the eastern part of the state, and it really threw a wrench in, obviously, basic everyday life, but also in efforts to set a place up to vote.

So many things go into establishing a ground game, a get-out-the-vote program for a campaign. You’ve got to have your offices set up. You’ve got to have infrastructure. You’ve got to have people—the water-bottle people got to be there. And people have to know where their polling places are. Things like that. You’ve got to be able to have your vans, take your people from community centers, from churches to the polls. You have to have people ready and out there for early voting and for voting by mail.

What Matthew did was: It completely disrupted those things in an area Democrats had to win in order to get the election. And now—

Rosin: So it’s no joke. It’s like real basic stuff, but it actually has a real effect.

Newkirk: Oh, yeah. Certainly. And you saw people. There were plenty of folks—in polls and poll workers—who were saying that this is absolutely disrupting normal election-year stuff that we need to do to get out the vote.

Rosin: David, you are there right now. So do you see some of what Vann saw? Like, do you see this already happening?

Graham: Yeah. I mean, all of that sort of preparation is going. Absentee ballots were delayed by a lot of legal wrangling over whether RFK Jr. would be on the ballot, but they’re going out, and people are getting ready for early voting.

But the question is: How will voting even work in western North Carolina? You know, are the elections offices fine? Are the early-voting sites fine? Are there people who can run the elections? I mean, all these questions, apart from the turnout questions for the campaigns, even the basic administration of elections is, you know—it may be fine, but no one really has any idea. So there’s a lot of questions.

Newkirk: And I’ll say it’s, honestly, at this point, not the biggest priority.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah.

Newkirk: The biggest priority: We don’t know if the utility companies are going to be able to restore power before the end of the year. That is a problem. We have a serious humanitarian problem that is going to only—I think, over the next few weeks, we’re going to see exactly how that takes shape.

When you lose power, there are a lot of things that can go wrong downstream of that, that you aren’t really thinking about when the floodwaters are there. But we’re talking dialysis. We’re talking: How did hospitals run? How do people go to school? Those are the primary concerns.

Rosin: You said last time, it affected areas the Democrats had to win. And this time?

Newkirk: Well, they have to win the whole state, so it will affect them, although the West is—those are 26 counties that Trump won. One of those counties, Buncombe County—Asheville’s there, and Asheville is absolutely part of the Democratic strategy.

Rosin: So this time, it also affects areas that Democrats need to win.

Newkirk: Both parties.

Rosin: Yeah.

Graham: Yeah. I mean, I think it is a bigger challenge for Republicans. I mean, the counties that are in the disaster area accounted for, like, a quarter of Trump’s vote in North Carolina in 2020. That’s a lot.

And, you know, I think Vann is totally right about Asheville. I also think that Buncombe County is probably likely to be, you know—the bigger cities are going to recover faster, and it’s these smaller towns that it’s going to take longer to bounce back.

So that’s going to be a challenge, especially when it doesn’t appear that the Trump operation has a whole lot of ground game, but I guess we’ll see.

Rosin: I will just acknowledge now, because I feel the need to that we already know over 100 people have died and hundreds of people are missing. It is weird to be talking about it in horse-race terms. It just happens to be the nature of our conversation. But, you know, there are so many stories in the news that are just—I mean, you can’t believe what it’s like to move through a sudden flood like that.

So I just want to say that. And like you said, Vann—I mean, we talk about it in this way because we’re thinking about the national election, but one of the effects it has on the election is, like: Nobody cares.

Graham: Right. It’s not the focus for those people. They’re not thinking about how they’re going to vote. They’re thinking about how they’re going to eat. Exactly.

Rosin: Right. Exactly. And, like, where they’re going to live and how all the stuff is gone.

Newkirk: Where their loved ones are right now.

Rosin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to mention, by the way, Hurricane Milton, which is happening just as this episode comes out. So we’re thinking about people facing Milton and also people recovering from Hurricane Helene.

Vann, David, thank you so much for coming on and talking about North Carolina.

Newkirk: Thank you.

Graham: Thank you.