Primary sets up close races in November
Published March 18, 2016
by Mark Barrett, Asheville Citizen-Times, March 16, 2016.
If a key promise of your campaign is bringing jobs back to the United States from overseas, there's a good chance you'll do well in North Carolina's small and medium-sized towns, where shuttered textile and furniture plants loom just off Main Street like giant tombstones.
But whether Donald Trump's appeal to disaffected blue-collar voters demonstrated in Tuesday's primary results in the state will be enough in November to overcome likely advantages for Hillary Clinton among African-Americans and residents of the fast-growing Charlotte and Research Triangle area is another question, experts say.
Political observers on Wednesday predicted close contests in North Carolina for both governor and president, assuming Trump and Clinton go on to claim their party's nominations.
"I think we are a purple state," said Chris Cooper, who teaches political science at Western Carolina University. "There's going to be a lot of money spent here and there's going to be some tight races."
"The presidential contest is likely to be close, as it has been for several cycles," said Ferrell Guillory, a longtime political journalist who now teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Trump was the leading vote-getter in Tuesday's Republican primary in the state, winning 40.2 percent of the vote to Sen. Ted Cruz's 36.8 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich got 12.7 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida polled 7.7 percent.
Clinton won the Democratic primary by a wider margin, with 54.6 percent of the vote to Sen. Bernie Sanders' 40.8.
Different in the mountains
Buncombe County and several other mountain counties were out of step with the rest of North Carolina, however, with Sanders winning the county on the Democratic side and Cruz among Republicans.
Sanders got 62.1 percent of the vote in Buncombe versus 35.4 percent for Clinton in the Democratic primary. All but three of the 17 counties Sanders won in the state were in the mountain region.
It's no coincidence that almost all of the mountain counties that Sanders won have small African-American populations, Cooper said.
"A lot of it has to do with the racial makeup of Western North Carolina versus the rest of the state," he said. "Sanders has traditionally not done well with African-American voters. This region of the state has always voted differently than the rest of the state."
Cruz got 41.9 percent of the vote in Buncombe County, followed by Trump at 30.9 percent, Kasich at 15.5 percent and Rubio at 9.1 percent.
It appeared that Cruz was able to mobilize evangelical voters in Buncombe and several other WNC counties. He also won Madison, Henderson, Transylvania and Wataugacounties in the region.
In Buncombe, "He had a pretty good system, a lot of support and a grass roots network," said Nathan West, chairman of the county Republican Party.
Trump appeared to have less of a network of activists in the area, although West said, "Part of Trump's appeal is that he can ignite people to get out to the polls without necessarily having a strong grassroots campaign."
Anger and discontent
Across the state, Guillory and Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College outside Charlotte, said economic worries boosted Trump while the more traditional coalition of mainstream Democrats and black voters helped Clinton.
"They say that people want radical change. It's on the Republican side and not the Democratic side," Roberts said.
Guillory said results heighten talk of two North Carolinas.
"The North Carolina that Trump carried consists of older white voters, especially male voters who are discontented with social and economic change (and feel) that their comfortable society has been disrupted," Guillory said. "Trump touched and mined this deposit of anxiety over racial change, over the decline of blue-collar manufacturing."
Working-class people in those communities are angry and Trump "gets those voters by default," Roberts said.
Clinton, however, "embodies the bi-racial, progressive, more urban coalition that supports the North Carolina Democratic Party," Guillory said. That now includes many high-tech and banking workers in Raleigh and Charlotte, he said.
Statewide Democratic candidates have sometimes been missing in action in past elections when their party's presidential nominee campaigns in the state. Their worry has been that voters will associate them with a presidential candidate's more liberal stances.
Republicans may face a similar dilemma this year of whether to campaign with Trump.
"Now the pressure is on Gov. (Pat) McCrory and Sen. (Richard) Burr. Will they show up with Donald Trump if he ends up being the Republican nominee?" Guillory said.
"There will be some potency to a Trump candidacy in this state, but it will put a lot of regular Republicans and businessmen in an uneasy state," he said.
That, he and Roberts said, could result in problems getting Republican regulars to do the work of getting their voters to the polls, and could motivate Democratic voters worried about the consequences of a Trump presidency to turn out.
For Cooper, pairing McCrory and Trump in advertising "might not be a bad strategy right now to get the Democrats to the polling place," Roberts said.
However, Clinton will engender differing levels of enthusiasm among Democratic voters too, Guillory said. When he voted yesterday, Guillory overheard a sour response when an unaffiliated voter next to him was asked which party's primary he would vote in.
"He said, 'I'm going to hold my nose and select the Democratic ballot,' " Guillory said.
?Interesting times ahead
Of course, it still isn't a certainty that Clinton and Trump will be at the top of the ticket come November.
Cooper said Clinton is nearly there. Guillory and Roberts said the Republican race could still have some twists and turns, including a contested convention.
Clinton's nomination is "as close to a sure thing as we can get in March," Cooper said. "Even if she does worse (in upcoming primaries) than she has before, she still has the delegates. The delegate math is in her favor, and that's an understatement."
Guillory expects Trump to be the GOP nominee, but added, "We still have some politics to play out in this election."
"It's hard to foresee exactly the path ahead, but it's easy to see continued turbulence in the Republican Party," he said.
If Trump is not the nominee, that would create problems for the GOP, Roberts said: "The voters that voted for Trump would be very frustrated."
With McCrory and Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper easily sweeping the gubernatorial primaries and running neck-and-neck in polls, the general election contest between them "could be the most watched gubernatorial race in the country," Roberts said.
Deborah Ross, who easily snagged the Democratic nomination to run against Burr for Senate, "has an uphill battle," Roberts said. She said the race will still attract attention as Democrats seek to gain control of the Senate and Republicans try to hold their majority and is likely to be "a very expensive race."
For all the strangeness and unpredictability of this year's presidential campaign, Chris Cooper said Tuesday's results actually went largely as forecast, with candidates backed by party establishments generally winning.
"Party politics is alive and well in North Carolina," he said.
"I think it is kind of a boring story in North Carolina. I think we saw a lot of what we would have expected. The front-running candidates did well and we didn't see too many surprises," Cooper said. "It was a predictable primary election, which is not to say it will be a predictable general election."
