North Carolina Breaks Democrats’
Hearts
Nov. 5, 2024
By Frank
Bruni
Frank Bruni is a contributing Opinion
writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
This
article has been updated to reflect new developments.
I
can’t overstate how much Democrats wanted to win North Carolina. How much hope
they invested in my state. How many reasons they found to argue that Vice
President Kamala Harris could emerge victorious, succeeding where every
Democratic presidential candidate this century — with the sole exception of
Barack Obama in 2008 — had failed.
By
all indications and reports, the Democratic turnout effort here was not only
better staffed and better organized, by far, than the Republican one, but it
was also, according to prominent North Carolina Democrats and seasoned
political analysts, superior to anything that any Democratic presidential
nominee put together in North Carolina in the past. And the state’s brisk
population growth since 2020, when Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump by
only about 1.3 percentage points, favored Harris, making the state’s
metropolitan areas bigger and turning them bluer.
But
in this fiercely contested and potentially prophetic battleground, that wasn’t
enough. After several furious months of nonstop television commercials,
countless yard signs, door knocking galore, cold calling ad nauseam and
incessant, traffic-snarling visits from the candidates themselves, Harris came
up short. Donald Trump came out on top.
And that will be examined as closely as the outcomes in any
of the other major battleground states, because for the entirety of this
agonizing election season, North Carolina functioned as a national mood ring
and mirror, vividly reflecting all the relevant 2024 dynamics and every major
plotline.
For
those of us who live here, Trump’s victory didn’t simply answer the question of
who’d get our state’s juicy trove of 16 electoral votes and, with them, draw
closer to winning the presidency. It concluded a political melodrama of the
highest and tensest order.
“I’ve
never seen people as anxious,” former Representative David Price, a North
Carolina Democrat who spent more than a quarter-century in the House, told me.
He said that while North Carolinians are used to swing state intensity, “this
time has been different. This is no holds barred.”
Although
Harris and her supporters had ample cause for optimism about North Carolina,
Trump and his supporters arguably had more. It has more rural voters than any of
the other six major battleground states, meaning that Harris’s
fortunes hinged on chipping away at Republicans’ enormous advantage in what is
undeniably Trump country.
“We
have a lot of people who are just baked in for Trump,” Representative Kathy
Manning, a North Carolina Democrat who decided not to run for re-election after
the state’s Republican lawmakers redrew her district, told me when we spoke
late Tuesday morning. She called herself “cautiously optimistic” about a Harris
victory in the state, but she also noted what a stiff challenge Harris faced,
especially with the third of the state’s voters who aren’t registered as either
Republican or Democratic. They’d have been more likely to choose Harris,
Manning said, “if we’d had more time to get out there and let those
unaffiliated voters know who she is and what motivates her and what her plans
are.” As it was, Harris’s entire presidential campaign spanned just 15 weeks.
She came to North Carolina in many of them. She and Trump
didn’t so much sweet-talk as stalk us, all the way to the finish. She dropped in on Saturday, as
did he — twice. He came back on Sunday. And again on Monday, on the
off chance we’d forgotten him.
Did
that make the difference? Impossible to know.
But
some dimensions of the presidential race in North Carolina are clearer than
before. There are, it turns out, limits to what a turnout operation can do. The
formidability of Harris’s was described in a recent column in
The Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who counted 360 paid staff members, 29
field offices, 40,000 volunteers and, in one week, more than 100,000 door
knocks and more than 1.8 million phone calls.
Milbank
wasn’t the only one impressed with it. Representative Deborah Ross, a North
Carolina Democrat who coasted to re-election Tuesday on predominantly
Democratic turf, told me during a conversation late Tuesday afternoon that when
she visited polling stations in the red patches of her district earlier in the
day, there were many more Democratic volunteers making Harris pitches than
there were Republican ones trumpeting Trump. “It’s astounding to me,” she said.
And
it was heartening, she said, as was her acquaintance with many North Carolina
Republicans who publicly repudiated Trump and announced their intentions to
vote for Harris as a way of preventing his return to the White House.
But,
she added, Trump was assiduously promoting “messages of fear” that might well
resonate “with people who have not fully recovered from the pandemic, who have
economic insecurity.” I lost count of the number of times I saw a Trump ad that
used an apocalyptic tone and sinister images to emphasize Harris’s support for
transgender inmates. He consistently and constantly cast Harris as some lefty
lunatic, a portrayal crafted for a Southern state like North Carolina.
Many Democrats had predicted that Harris would benefit
significantly in North Carolina from the votes of women angry about the Supreme
Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, especially given the state’s high-profile
governor’s race, in which the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faced
a withering ad campaign spotlighting his past support for an abortion ban with
no exceptions. Several of the commercials run by Robinson’s Democratic
opponent, North Carolina’s attorney general, Josh Stein, used portions of a
past statement of Robinson’s in which he insisted that abortion was “about
killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down
or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice — because you felt
like getting your groove thing on.”
Robinson’s
history of extremist positions and viciously bigoted comments made him the
apotheosis of MAGA fury and a test case for a swing state’s tolerance for that
even before a CNN report in
mid-September that he had frequented a porn site where he identified himself as
a “black NAZI!” and celebrated slavery. Although he denied that and later filed a lawsuit against CNN, many of the people
working on his campaign quit, and many Republicans outside North Carolina
effectively gave up on him.
Would
that hobble Trump, who early this year called Robinson “better than Martin Luther King” but
over the past month and a half pretended that Robinson never existed? That question
occupied the thoughts of many political analysts, because even if a sizable
group of North Carolina Republicans or Republican-leaning independents were
comfortable with a Trump-Stein ticket split, a percentage of them might be so
demoralized and disgusted by the Robinson fiasco that they just didn’t bother
to vote — or so the thinking went.
Though
Stein handily defeated Robinson — by what looked to be a margin of more than 15
percentage points — Robinson didn’t drag down Trump. North Carolina voters,
known for splitting their tickets in the past, did so to an even greater extent
this time around.
“North
Carolina, like this country, is a complex place.” Damon Circosta, who served as
the chair of the North Carolina State Board of Elections from 2019 to 2023,
told me in a text message shortly after Trump was declared the victor here.
“Next year, North Carolinians will have to do what we have always done — find a
way to live among one another, work alongside of each other and make sense of
the fact that none of us are as easily categorized as it may seem.”
Was Trump actually helped by the lies that he told and the
distrust that he sowed after Hurricane Helene ripped through western North
Carolina, causing catastrophic damage? That will — and should — be a focus of
post-mortems on the presidential race here. He and many other prominent
Republicans made all sorts of charges and promoted all manner of conspiracy
theories about government officials targeting or ignoring Helene’s victims, and
those grievances had so much traction — which any quick perusal of social media
scarily demonstrated — that even a few Republican politicians in North Carolina
spoke up and spoke out to tell people to disregard that nonsense. It was a
noble attempt at cleanup, but the mess had already been made.
Harris
was up against that and against a general dissatisfaction among Americans —
North Carolinians included — with the direction of the country and the state of
the economy. While she tried at times and in ways to present herself as the
candidate of change, her past four years as Biden’s governing partner made that
a difficult sell.
When
I spoke with Price, the former congressman, over the weekend, he said that he
thought Harris had a good shot. But he also recognized how often Democrats had
branded North Carolina the “New South,” only to have it cling to its old ways,
and how frequently their pronouncements of its dawning progressivism had been
contradicted.
“Ever
since forever, we’ve thought that one of these days, things are going to tip
around here,” Price said. “But we’re always falling short.”
He
also wondered if Trump’s onstage meltdowns over the final week of his campaign
would matter as much to voters in North Carolina and elsewhere as they did to
the media. ”I see this endgame stuff going on — the Madison Square Garden
thing, the fantasizing about Liz Cheney, this craziness, a lot of it related to
women — and I honestly don’t know if it penetrates,” he said. “So many things
have happened that didn’t penetrate.”
That’s the story of a national race that often seemed
strangely impervious to developments that promised to have greater effect than
they ultimately did. And of a state — my state — reverting to type when there
were so many reasons it shouldn’t.
