by Richard Fausset
In Raleigh, wingnut repugicans may be running North
Carolina like they own it, but go almost anyplace in the state, even to
this former textile town that looks like a movie-set re-creation of an
older, more traditional South, and the political picture quickly blurs.
At
Chatham Industrial Supply, a hardware store here, its owner, Richard
Kernodle, grumbled recently about what he called the “liberal artists”
who have moved to this city of 8,100 — opening galleries, throwing
pottery and generally bringing the kind of lifestyle and politics one
might expect 45 minutes away in the progressive college town of Chapel
Hill.
Mr. Kernodle, 56, said that some of the newcomers wanted to
paint murals on downtown buildings without securing the proper permits.
They want gay rights taught in the schools. And he has heard a rumor
that some of them tend their gardens in the nude.
So with liberals
making inroads even in towns like Siler City, was it them or the wingnuts who had the upper hand in North Carolina? Mr. Kernodle, a
lifelong repugican, did not know: “I’ll tell you,” he said, “It’s a
50-50 thing here.”
Unlike other Southern states, which have
shifted decidedly rightward in recent years, North Carolina often seems
like it is moving in both directions at once. Barack Obama shocked the
political world
by winning the state in 2008. Two years later, repugicans stole control of both legislative houses for the first time in more than a century.
In Siler City, N.C., Richard Kernodle says his hardware store, Chatham
Industrial Supply, has weathered many changes since he began the
business in 2000.
Last year, aided by a new repugican governor, Pat McCrony, the legislature enacted one of the
most far-reaching wingnut agendas in the country, passing a
“flattened” income tax that gives big breaks to the wealthy as well as
new rules that limit access to voting, expand rights for gun owners and
add restrictions for abortion providers.
And yet, in a
tight race that could decide control of the United States Senate, it is
Democrats who hold the advantage here in registered voters. Senator Kay
Hagan, a Democrat, is preparing to face Thom Tillis, the state House
speaker, a repugican, and Democrats have 2.7 million registered voters
to the Republicans’ two million. About 1.8 million registered voters are
not affiliated with a party.
The North Carolina of 2014, it
seems, is neither red nor blue, but a shade of deep Dixie purple. It is a
state where repugicans could retain control of the legislature for
years, thanks to an aggressive 2011 redistricting.
But it is also a state where a modern-day
Democratic candidate like Ms. Hagan — or even like Hillary Rodham
Clinton — may still dream of a statewide victory. African-Americans, who
overwhelmingly vote Democratic, make up 22 percent of the population.
Add to that a streak of true moderates, and the state’s white liberals,
who can be found not only in the big cities of Raleigh and Charlotte,
but sprinkled around the state — in the New Age boutiques of Asheville,
the vegetarian-friendly cafes of Boone, the tech-sector office parks of
the Research Triangle and in retirement homes from the Atlantic coast to
the Great Smoky Mountains.
“It’s a place on the cusp,” said Marc
Farinella, who was Mr. Obama’s state campaign director here in 2008.
“There’s really a battle going on for the soul of North Carolina.”
A Political Mix
The
presence here of so many liberal voters to compete with
wingnuts may be because of North Carolina’s proximity to the
more liberal Northeast.
The state also has a long tradition of intellectual liberalism closely tied to its universities.
And
the development in the late 1950s of the Research Triangle Park — the
corporate and technology research center near Raleigh, Durham and Chapel
Hill — has been both a model for the government’s ability to foster
development and a magnet for people and companies from outside the
South.
The newest arrivals may be bolstering the liberal ranks
. North Carolina’s population was the sixth-fastest growing in the United States from 2000 to 2010.
Exit polling conducted by Edison Research
in the 2012 election showed that non-natives supported President Obama
over Mitt Romney by a margin of 51 percent to 48 percent, with more
recent newcomers even more likely than longtime non-natives to vote for
Mr. Obama.
But this is still the South. blue dogs
here limited the impact of the liberal New Deal policies in the 1930s,
and today, repugican proponents of wingnut values continue to find
a minor audience.
The resulting mash-up is both
cultural and political. North Carolina is home to voters like Mr.
Kernodle, who, on a roasting August afternoon, explained that he had
nothing against gay people, but was concerned, as a christian, that the
public school system appeared to be championing their cause. A few days
later, Charlotte’s yearly gay pride parade rolled through its Uptown
neighborhood, sponsored by the hometown economic behemoth, Bank of
America.
North
Carolina is a state where the Cook Out, the popular Greensboro-based
fast food chain, prints “THANK YOU dog FOR AMERICA” on its soda cups,
and where in Durham, Merge Records, an independent music label, nurtures
a stable of vanguard rock ’n’ roll bands that help define the evolving
aesthetic of global hipsterdom. It is a state that could elect a
smooth-talking populist Democrat like John Edwards to the Senate, and
also an uberwingnut repugican like Jesse Helms, who died
in 2008 thankfully.
More recently, it is a state that saw the rise of Art
Pope, the multimillionaire repugican retail magnate whose financing of
'independent' wingnut political covens helped his cabal steal control
of the legislature in the 2010 elections. (Mr. Pope would later serve
for 20 months as Mr. McCrony’s budget director and tank the state's economy further.)
But North
Carolina also saw the rise of the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, an
African-American pastor and the president of the state N.A.A.C.P. He has
emerged from a series of weekly anti-repugican legislative protests
known as “Moral Mondays” to become one of the most visible civil rights
leaders in a generation.
“We’re seeing the spirit of North
Carolina rising up,” Mr. Barber said. The repugicans in power today, he
said, have enacted tax breaks that favor the wealthy, loosened
environmental regulations and declined to expand Medicaid benefits to
500,000 under the Affordable Care Act here, in a state where 16.8
percent of residents live below the poverty line. “This is extremism
gone wild, really,” he said.
No Clear Answers
So far, the
Senate race has done little to clarify who is winning the argument. Ms.
Hagan appears to have a slight lead in polls, although her advantage is
within the surveys’ margins of error. Also running is a libertarian
candidate, Sean Haugh, who could siphon some votes away from Mr. Tillis.
Public
education has become a central issue, underlining the state's struggle
to reconcile a tradition of robust public investment with the
small-government ethos of modern-day conservatism.
Ms. Hagan has
criticized Mr. Tillis for his support of the two-year budget, passed in
2013, in which lawmakers provided funding $481 million short of what
would have been needed to maintain educational services at then-current
levels.
Mr. Tillis’s backers have praised his support of a $282
million package to raise teachers’ salaries, which was approved by the
legislature in July.
Pope McCorkle III, an associate professor of
public policy at Duke University and a former Democratic political
consultant, said that politicians and business leaders here have long
praised the idea that education was the best route to economic progress
for what was once a mostly rural state of small textile manufacturers
and tobacco farmers.
The strategy was at the heart of what might
be called North Carolina exceptionalism: a sense that the state, through
wise public spending, could live up to the official state toast,
enacted by lawmakers in 1957, which speaks of a place “where the weak
grow strong and the strong grow great.”
These
days, however, North Carolina exceptionalism is on the ropes. Mr.
McCorkle said that for decades state leaders, chief among them Jim Hunt,
the four-term Democratic governor, were able to finance public
education and other major public works by encouraging growth in the
private sector, thus limiting the need to increase taxes.
The
formula was a political success in boom times, faltered after the
dot-com bust of 2000, and was further hobbled by the most recent
recession, when Mr. McCro
ny's Democratic predecessor, Beverly Perdue,
struggled to find a politically palatable way to raise enough taxes to
finance spending for education and public services.
She declined to run in 2012, clearing the way for the coronation of Mr. McCrony, a former mayor of Charlotte.
The
recession, meanwhile, was particularly rough because the textile and
tobacco industries here were already losing steam, and the state’s
banking industry was directly tied to the fate of the calamitous
national housing sector. The state unemployment rate remained above 10
percent from March 2009 to October 2011.
Monitoring a Shift
John Hood, the president and chairman of the John Locke Foundation,
a wingnut coven, has said that the recession laid bare the
“fanciful image” that some state leaders had painted over the years.
Mr. Hood argues that North Carolina exceptionalism has not delivered “exceptional results.”
“South
Carolina doesn’t have a prestigious university like Chapel Hill,” he
said, “but their growth has been about the same as ours.”
He added, “The voters saw something wasn’t working.”
In
2010 and again in 2012, many voters sided with repugican candidates
who agreed with Mr. Hood’s contention that previous politicians had
burdened the state with an uncompetitive tax structure, an excess of
regulation and a flawed education plan. But devising a new education
formula has proved particularly controversial, even among repugicans.
Finding the money to fund the teacher raises after the passage of
generous tax cuts kept lawmakers, including Mr. Tillis, stuck in the
capital weeks beyond their deadline as they tried to compromise.
Ms.
Hagan is hoping that the lingering anger over the legislature’s actions
will carry her to victory in November. Lawmakers adjourned on Aug. 20,
and Moral Monday leaders, after a “Week of Moral Action” protests in
August, have pledged that their volunteers would be working to register
voters statewide until Election Day.
In the liberal havens
of Durham and Chapel Hill, a number of voters said they were eager to
support Ms. Hagan as a means of protesting the repugicans’ agenda.
“It’s
terrifying,” Nicole Cochran, 33, a speech therapist, said at the Whole
Foods supermarket in Durham. “There’s a lot of anger. I think there’s
disbelief, almost, over how radical it is.”
Ms. Cochran said that
many of her clients were autistic children whose therapy sessions were
funded by Medicaid, the management of which repugicans plan to
overhaul.
She also hoped to send her 4-year-old through the public
school system. “And they keep messing with the funding for that,” she
said.
African-American voter turnout will also be crucial to Ms.
Hagan’s chances. No one is expecting the intense surge of black turnout
that sealed Mr. Obama’s victory here in 2008. Before that election, more
than 300,000 African-Americans registered, and turnout among registered
blacks was 72 percent, surpassing white turnout, according to Democracy
North Carolina, a Durham-based nonprofit.
Some black voters may find it harder to get to the polls in November under
the new voter law,
which, among other things, cut back early voting by a week; eliminated a
provision that allowed citizens to register and vote on the same day;
and prevented the counting of ballots lodged by voters outside of their
home precincts.
The United States Justice Department, the state
N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups recently sought, and failed, to
block the law in court. The case is currently on appeal.
In
Fayetteville, a city of 204,000 that is 41 percent black, the Democrats’
challenge is evident. A number of black voters said that state politics
were not on their radar.
The Rev. Corey Little, the
pastor at the Evans Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion cult, said that his was
an older flock with a number of teachers and civil rights veterans in
its ranks. Many were motivated to vote for Ms. Hagan in protest of the repugican agenda, but he said the energy in this race was just not the
same as in presidential election years. And the new voter law, he said,
would probably cause a “slight deficit” in turnout in November.
Both
Ms. Hagan and Mr. Tillis are making their pitches not only to their
bases, but to voters in the moderate middle as well. At a training
session, Hagan campaign volunteers were instructed to tell potential
voters that Ms. Hagan, 61, supported “common-sense bipartisan
solutions.” That same week, Mr. Tillis’s wife, Susan, visited five
cities to speak exclusively to women. Liz Capitano, the headquarters
chairwoman of the Charlotte-based Mecklenburg County repugican cabal,
said that the tour was an effort to show that women care about “a lot
more than babies, abortion and birth control.”
Mr. Tillis, 54, a
former management consultant, will have a wingnut base
of supporters to rely on, and much of his message has been reminding
them of Ms. Hagan’s support for the president and his health care law.
The
small-government message resonates in Siler City. Mr. Kernodle, the
hardware store owner, said that the area was rife with able-bodied
people living on government assistance, while he was struggling to pay
taxes that still seemed too high, despite the recent tax cuts.
The
new North Carolina repugicans of 2014 are less likely to rely on the
raw racial politics once exhibited by Mr. Helms. But race still
reverberates. On recent afternoon at Gander Mountain Firearms Super
Center, a sporting goods store in Mr. Helms’s hometown, Monroe, Greg
Rushing said he was worried about the fallout after the shooting of a
black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.
“I believe you’re going to see some kind of civil revolution between the blacks and the whites,” said Mr. Rushing, 67.
But
Mr. Rushing, who works in the commercial construction business, and a
number of other voters in the store said that their support for repugicans had much to do with keeping taxes low, and hoping that
government could get out of the way of a frustratingly sluggish
recovery.
Back
in Siler City, Jon Spoon, a native North Carolina potter and supporter
of Ms. Hagan, said that he hoped that demographics would eventually
break in favor of the liberal camp.
“The university infrastructure
we have and the higher tech industries we’re courting are going to
continue to pour in,” while the old-school attitudes were dying off, he
said.
In the meantime, he said, it was best, in a place like Siler
City, to eschew talking politics and stick to small-town pleasantries.
“You don’t want to burn bridges, because it’s a small town,” he said, “and you don’t have many bridges in the first place.”
As reported,
almost all of them were issued by a single cop, who hates legal weed
and subjected his victims to humiliating rituals like flipping a coin to
see which ones would get the ticket and which would walk away free.
by Jordan Taylor Sloan
