Politics

North Carolina is the center of the political universe as the state’s demographics shift dramatically

Published

4 years ago

October 22, 2020

The state the President won by more than 3 percentage points four years ago has continued its gradual political transformation, moving away from the red states to its south and toward its bluer neighbors to the north. The transformation has been propelled by a mix of factors: The state is growing more diverse with Hispanic and Asian immigrants, its cities and suburbs are booming with unbridled growth from northern transplants, older voters from the northeast who are fleeing Trump have retired to the state’s coast and the Tar Heel State’s once large rural population is shrinking.

This shift has been occurring for years, but it could present Trump and Republicans with a perfect storm of problems at the same time that the state has become the center of the political universe with close races for president, Senate and governor. And many of his diehard voters in rural Eastern North Carolina know it.

“We realize that we have been infiltrated by other people that have more liberal views… than we do,” Cheryl Miles, a Trump supporter, said as she stood in line in Williamston, North Carolina, with Greg, her husband of more than 50 years. “To me, it is important, as a Christian, that you need to go out and express yourself.”

Martin County, after twice voting for President Barack Obama, narrowly backed Trump in 2016, helping him cut into margins in the bigger metropolitan areas. Republicans in the area believe the same could happen this November, as Christian conservatives who were somewhat skeptical of Trump four years ago are now fully behind the Republican leader. But the county, like others around it, has been losing population over the last decade.

“He stands for Christian values,” Miles said. “I know that sometimes when he talks, he doesn’t talk the way I would like for him to talk. But I like the stands that he takes. And sometimes you have to look beyond what the person is saying and (to) what he is doing.”

Williamston is just 90 miles to the east of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. That short physical separation represents a vast political divide.

The greater area around Raleigh, including college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham, is known as the research triangle, because of the topflight universities that are crammed into a relatively small area. Those institutions have not only attracted hundreds of thousands of more liberal voters to North Carolina, but they have provided the intellectual capital to fuel a growing technology and health care industry that has led to thousands of new jobs just over the last few years.

It was one of those institutions that brought Glen Almond and his wife Judith McLaren to Raleigh from Canada more than 30 years ago. The couple had been on green cards for decades, unable to vote in any election. But then Trump won, and the couple said shortly thereafter they became citizens almost expressly to vote against the President.

“I wanted to vote in the worst damn way,” Almond said, standing in line on the NC State campus as rain poured around him and he prepared to vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “I’ll be honest with you: I really want to vote against Trump. That was the primary thing.”

These divergent views explain why, just two weeks before Election Day, North Carolina remains a toss-up, according to multiple recent polls that find Biden with the narrowest of margins. But the differences between people like Miles and Almond also show the dramatically divergent paths to victory Trump and Biden have in a key state.

Obama, the last Democrat to win the state in 2008, carried North Carolina because of overwhelming turnout from Black and young Americans. Biden’s path, while similar, has some notable differences: In order to carry North Carolina next month, Biden will lean on a coalition that is Whiter, more suburban and older than the one that delivered the state to Obama 12 years ago. It’s a shift that reflects the changing state.

Trump, on the other hand, can’t solely count on the same turnout from Eastern and Western North Carolina, the two areas that propelled him to victory four years ago. The President will need people like Cheryl and Greg Miles to come up in such force that it overwhelms the growing suburbs around Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh.

“He is going to (need to) boost his numbers in rural counties to make up for what looks like an even bigger defeat in Raleigh, Charlotte,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor at Catawba College and an expert on the state’s politics. “I am just not sure how much more he can squeeze out of those rural areas.”

‘He is just the President — he is not God’

For Keith Kidwell, it made more sense for him and his dog Biscuit to set up shop next to an early voting site in Washington, North Carolina, than attend a Trump rally 30 minutes down the road.

“I’ve got a pretty good fix that most of the ones going to the Trump rally are probably voting for me,” said Kidwell, whose signs tout him as the “most conservative” member of the North Carolina General Assembly.

Kidwell has earned that reputation. He is staunchly against wearing masks to combat the coronavirus and did not wear one when greeting voters in Washington. He believes the right to life “covers you from conception until natural death” and his website states he will defend the right to bear arms “to my death.”

That conservatism is paying off for the first-term representative — scores of voters told him they had just voted for him as he stood outside the Beaufort County early voting site. Kidwell feels confident he will do fine in his district. With many new voters statewide, however, he has some concerns.

Visit CNN’s Election Center for full coverage of the 2020 race

“It worries me more on the statewide and national elections. … But I think we are going to do well. North Carolina is, even if our metro areas are more liberal leaning, we still have a good number of people who are conservative.”

That confidence hinges on conservative voters like Brian and Joan Buck, who were both wearing Trump plastic wristbands and whose keys was affixed to a Trump keychain.

Both voted for Trump in 2016, but their support for the President has deepened in the last four years. Brian Buck said it is “concerning” that liberals are “coming from up north down to North Carolina” and he feared it would eventually “change us from a toss-up state to a blue state.”

Both wore masks as they made their way into the voting booth, but gave Trump some leeway on his handling of the coronavirus, the issue that has dominated the general election.

“The damn Democrats don’t realize that he is just the President. He is not God,” Brian Buck said. “What was he supposed to do? Go into the basement and go hocus pocus and make a damn treatment for it? No. So they blame him for it, but he had no more control over it getting here than I did.”

That sentiment was echoed by Pamela Sawyer, who was so eager to vote for the President a second time that she said, “And I will vote for him in four more years.”

“I believe he is more for the Christians than the Democrats,” said Sawyer. “And that is one of the most important things.”

Trump’s campaign is banking on voters like these in Eastern and Western North Carolina, believing that enough turnout in these areas could provide a counterbalance to the growing cities.

“In 2016, President Trump brought out a lot of voters in the Eastern part of the state that previously voted for Barack Obama, or didn’t vote, because he wasn’t a stereotypical Republican,” said Nick Trainer, Trump’s director of battleground strategy. These voters “saw Barack Obama as a change agent and saw Donald Trump as a change agent.”

But Trainer added that he believes that 20% to 25% of Black men voting in North Carolina this year could back the President, providing the Trump campaign with a firewall against a possible “progressive wave” in more urban areas. Trainer said that level of support would be “icing on the cake in North Carolina, rather than critical to success.”

Little on the ground in Beaufort County backed up that assertion. And voters like David Holmes, a Black Army and Air Force veteran, took issue with that Trump claim.

“I really don’t trust Donald Trump,” he said, wearing a Desert Storm veteran hat, US Army mask and white veteran T-shirt. “It has been awhile since there has been this kind of unrest in politics in this country. … It is best not to discuss politics because there is always going to be some friction involved.”

‘Concentrated area of relocated Yankees’

If there is one city emblematic of the political changes happening in North Carolina, it is likely Cary, a leafy suburb to the west of Raleigh with so many new residents from the north that longtime North Carolinians like to joke that Cary stands for “Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees.”

One of those so-called Yankees would be Bridgette Hodges, an African-American grandmother who moved to the state from New Jersey around a year ago to be closer to her family, like Sanaa, her grandchild. The duo waited for over two hours on a recent rainy Friday so Hodges could not only vote for Biden, but register as a North Carolina voter for the first time.

“Things are changing dramatically for our country and there is so much racism and violence,” Hodges said. Looking at her grandchild, she added, “If she is a kid and she tells me what her opinion is looking at what is going on, it is really rough.”

Democrats in the state believe it is voters like Hodges who hold the key to a Biden victory.

“There are two groups we need to be focused on and that is turning out the African American vote and also suburban women,” said Meredith Cuomo, the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party. “We have seen just a real shift in our demographics since 2016.”

One of those key changes has been a growing Hispanic community. The state has seen dramatic increases in the number of registered Hispanic voters, growth that has tracked with the overall increase — the state now has roughly 1 million Hispanic residents, up from around 800,000 in 2010.

Lesly Puebla, who was born in Mexico, raised in Texas and later moved to North Carolina for her father’s job, has seen this growth and said that the way the President has talked about Hispanic immigrants encouraged her to vote for Biden this year. Puebla voted for a third-party candidate in 2016.

“I have seen a lot of things said about Hispanics that are not true,” she said, standing in front of Southern High School with her three children, all of whom accompanied their mother while she voted. “(Those comments) encouraged me to go out and vote and especially show my kids about our heritage and that not all the things that are said are true, that we need to speak up as well.”

Turning out voters like Hodges and Puebla was the missing piece for Clinton in 2016, whose campaign went into Election Day believing she would win the state. But turnout was down among reliable Democratic voters and up with voters in Eastern and Western reaches of the state, delivering Trump the win.

To date, turnout seems high in North Carolina. As of this week, nearly 2 million ballots have been cast in the state early, a remarkable surge that represents 25% of registered voters.

For many, like Conrad Plyler, a registered Republican from Durham, that early ballot cast was a proud vote against Trump.

Plyler, who works as a real estate manager in the area, said he had been a Republican for “a long time” but soured on Trump during his 2016 campaign, saying it was clear the would-be President had a “very racist perceptive of life.”

While Plyler left his presidential vote blank in 2016, he has decided to vote for Biden four years later. It’s this voter — the disaffected Republican who lives around a major metropolitan area — that worries Republicans headed into Election Day.

“I don’t think of myself as an anomaly, I think that younger Republican voters are more progressive… and it has now become a generational thing inside the party,” said Plyler, his long red beard hanging out of his mask. “So, if Republicans are scared of these kinds of voters, then they are scared of Republicans. That’s the shame of it.”

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Politics

Trump is consistently inconsistent on abortion and reproductive rights

Published

5 hours ago

October 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

CHICAGO (AP) — Donald Trump has had a tough time finding a consistent message to questions about abortion and reproductive rights.

The former president has constantly shifted his stances or offered vague, contradictory and at times nonsensical answers to questions on an issue that has become a major vulnerability for Republicans in this year’s election. Trump has been trying to win over voters, especially women, skeptical about his views, especially after he nominated three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn the nationwide right to abortion two years ago.

The latest example came this week when the Republican presidential nominee said some abortion laws are “too tough” and would be “redone.”

“It’s going to be redone,” he said during a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday. “They’re going to, you’re going to, you end up with a vote of the people. They’re too tough, too tough. And those are going to be redone because already there’s a movement in those states.”

Trump did not specify if he meant he would take some kind of action if he wins in November, and he did not say which states or laws he was talking about. He did not elaborate on what he meant by “redone.”

He also seemed to be contradicting his own stand when referencing the strict abortion bans passed in Republican-controlled states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump recently said he would vote against a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot that is aimed at overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban. That decision came after he had criticized the law as too harsh.

Trump has shifted between boasting about nominating the justices who helped strike down federal protections for abortion and trying to appear more neutral. It’s been an attempt to thread the divide between his base of anti-abortion supporters and the majority of Americans who support abortion rights.

About 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to restrict them in statewide votes over the past two years.

Trump also has been repeating the narrative that he returned the question of abortion rights to states, even though voters do not have a direct say on that or any other issue in about half the states. This is particularly true for those living in the South, where Republican-controlled legislatures, many of which have been gerrymandered to give the GOP disproportionate power, have enacted some of the strictest abortion bans since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Currently, 13 states have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy, while four more ban it after six weeks — before many women know they’re pregnant.

Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups and their Republican allies in state governments are using an array of strategies to counter proposed ballot initiatives in at least eight states this year.

Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s fluctuating stances on reproductive rights.

Flip-flopping on Florida

On Tuesday, Trump claimed some abortion laws are “too tough” and would be “redone.”

But in August, Trump said he would vote against a state ballot measure that is attempting to repeal the six-week abortion ban passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That came a day after he seemed to indicate he would vote in favor of the measure. Trump previously called Florida’s six-week ban a “terrible mistake” and too extreme. In an April Time magazine interview, Trump repeated that he “thought six weeks is too severe.”

Trump on vetoing a national ban

Trump’s latest flip-flopping has involved his views on a national abortion ban.

During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate, Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he would veto a national abortion ban: “Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it.”

This came just weeks after Trump repeatedly declined to say during the presidential debate with Democrat Kamala Harris whether he would veto a national abortion ban if he were elected.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said in an interview with NBC News before the presidential debate that Trump would veto a ban. In response to debate moderators prompting him about Vance’s statement, Trump said: “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness. And I don’t mind if he has a certain view, but I don’t think he was speaking for me.”

‘Pro-choice’ to 15-week ban

Trump’s shifting abortion policy stances began when the former reality TV star and developer started flirting with running for office.

He once called himself “very pro-choice.” But before becoming president, Trump said he “would indeed support a ban,” according to his book “The America We Deserve,” which was published in 2000.

In his first year as president, he said he was “pro-life with exceptions” but also said “there has to be some form of punishment” for women seeking abortions — a position he quickly reversed.

At the 2018 annual March for Life, Trump voiced support for a federal ban on abortion on or after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

More recently, Trump suggested in March that he might support a national ban on abortions around 15 weeks before announcing that he instead would leave the matter to the states.

Views on abortion pills, prosecuting women

In the Time interview, Trump said it should be left up to the states to decide whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor women’s pregnancies.

“The states are going to make that decision,” Trump said. “The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

Democrats have seized on the comments he made in 2016, saying “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions.

Trump also declined to comment on access to the abortion pill mifepristone, claiming that he has “pretty strong views” on the matter. He said he would make a statement on the issue, but it never came.

Trump responded similarly when asked about his views on the Comstock Act, a 19th century law that has been revived by anti-abortion groups seeking to block the mailing of mifepristone.

IVF and contraception

In May, Trump said during an interview with a Pittsburgh television station that he was open to supporting regulations on contraception and that his campaign would release a policy on the issue “very shortly.” He later said his comments were misinterpreted.

In the KDKA interview, Trump was asked, “Do you support any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception?”

“We’re looking at that and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly,” Trump responded.

Trump has not since released a policy statement on contraception.

Trump also has offered contradictory statements on in vitro fertilization.

During the Fox News town hall, which was taped Tuesday, Trump declared that he is “the father of IVF,” despite acknowledging during his answer that he needed an explanation of IVF in February after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law.

Trump said he instructed Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., to “explain IVF very quickly” to him in the aftermath of the ruling.

As concerns over access to fertility treatments rose, Trump pledged to promote IVF by requiring health insurance companies or the federal government to pay for it. Such a move would be at odds with the actions of much of his own party.

Even as the Republican Party has tried to create a national narrative that it is receptive to IVF, these messaging efforts have been undercut by GOP state lawmakers, Republican-dominated courts and anti-abortion leaders within the party’s ranks, as well as opposition to legislative attempts to protect IVF access.

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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Politics

Saskatchewan Party’s Scott Moe, NDP’s Carla Beck react to debate |

Published

5 hours ago

October 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

Saskatchewan‘s two main political party leaders faced off in the only televised debate in the lead up to the provincial election on Oct. 28. Saskatchewan Party Leader Scott Moe and NDP Leader Carla Beck say voters got a chance to see their platforms. (Oct. 17, 2024)

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Politics

Saskatchewan political leaders back on campaign trail after election debate

Published

5 hours ago

October 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

REGINA – Saskatchewan‘s main political leaders are back on the campaign trail today after hammering each other in a televised debate.

Saskatchewan Party Leader Scott Moe is set to make an announcement in Moose Jaw.

Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck is to make stops in Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert.

During Wednesday night’s debate, Beck emphasized her plan to make life more affordable and said people deserve better than an out-of-touch Saskatchewan Party government.

Moe said his party wants to lower taxes and put money back into people’s pockets.

Election day is Oct. 28.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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