N. Carolina has a certain swing to it as race heads to finish line
CHARLOTTE, N. C.— A motorcade of black SUVs with Maryland and New York plates — accompanied by the requisite stern looking guys in black suits — was attracting aa a few sideways glances out- side The Ivey’s boutique hotel in the uptown city centre of Charlotte Wednesday WW morning. A few construc- tion workers in orange vests gathered nearby to see what the fuss was about. Some passing joggers slowed and stared. A man who had been sleeping on a bench across the street craned his neck.
Then out of the hotel came the clicking stilettos of Ivanka Trump — the president’s daughter, White House adviser, reality show sidekick, and campaign ambassador — wearing a powder blue overcoat and white surgical mask, an aa aide walking to her right and a Se- cret Service agent to her left.
Ivanka’s been making news lately. Out stumping for dad — Tuesday in Florida, Wednesday morning here in North Carolina, Wednesday afternoon in Pennsylvania. Tuesday, a crowd at Donald Trump’s rally in Michigan chanted cc that they wanted her to run f for president. The president told the crowd she’d be happier to stay home and take care of her kids while her husband Jared Kushner negotiated peace deals.
This week, she and Jared also made headlines by threatening to sue the Lincoln Project over billboards the organization posted in Times Square criticizing their role in the country’s COVID death toll. And then Jared was making news again Wednesday when tapes of his April interviews with Bob Woodward got released by CNN — in which he says President Trump was “getting the country back from the doctors” to handle COVID himself, to end the “panic” phase and start the “comeback” phase. More than 200,000 deaths later, the claims struck some as reflecting poorly on Ivanka’s dad. They were hitting airwaves and social media just about the time she was standing on the sidewalk in North Carolina.
“Four more years, Ivanka!” shouted a man on the red brick sidewalk about three metres away. She looked over and waved, then got in her car and was driven away. The motorcade drove down the street to where the road has been blocked and pedestrianized around a Black Lives Matter street mural, turned the corner and was gone — on the way to a question and answer with local supporters.
Your correspondent was supposed to be at that question and answer, but after granting me credentials and telling me what time to arrive, the Trump campaign failed to furnish the location. So here I was outside her hotel instead.
“I don’t think North Carolina is in play like people think,” says real estate developer Greg Mintz, the man who shouted out to Ivanka from the sidewalk. He was a Charlotte resident until late last year when he moved to Georgia, and still has business investments here, which is what brings him to town. “I think North Carolina is a very Republican stronghold.”
It’s not clear the Trump campaign is as certain of that as he is. Ivanka’s visit less than a week before election day is evidence the Republicans are fighting hard to win votes here. It’s not just Ivanka, it’s a family effort: Tiffany Trump held two events in North Carolina Tuesday, Eric and Lara Trump are each holding separate events in the state Friday and the president himself was to hold a rally in Fayetteville Thursday, his ninth visit since the Republican National Convention — which was partly held here in Charlotte.
You read all the time — I write all the time — about different swing states and why they’re important: Pennsylvania might be the tipping point in the election, Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida are big enough to change things significantly. North Carolina is interesting because it’s among the most truly purple toss-up states (it elected a Democratic governor in the same 2016 election in which Trump won it), it has been among the closest in polling this year and Trump absolutely needs it. “I think there is a path to victory for Biden that doesn’t go down Tobacco Road, but I don’t think the same is true for President Trump,” Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper recently told the Asheville Citizen Times, explaining why it was in many ways the most important state.
Current poll averages show Democrat Joe Biden with a two-point lead, according to FiveThirtyEight.com. The betting lines offered Wednesday by SportsBetting.ag implied oddsmakers think Biden has a 55 per cent chance of winning. So here come the Trumps. And there, on the sidewalk Wednesday morning, went Ivanka.
Mintz, as he indicated in his shout out, is a supporter of President Donald Trump. “I’m a business person, there’s definitely — the economy plays a big factor. But you know, I have a daughter, I have a young family in Atlanta. I mean, I know the world’s progressing and I’m with progress. But some of the changes I hear from the Democratic side — I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a world that looks so different from the world that I grew up in the ’80s, and ’90s. I want some semblance of, you know, of normalcy.” When you walk around the Charlotte uptown area, which is so clean and new and exactingly designed it feels almost like you’re wandering around an architect’s rendering of a city they’re building from scratch, you don’t hear too much of that fear of change. As in other bigger cities, many people in town want change from this election. Change in the COVID situation, change in health care, change from the bitter anger that has defined recent politics.
“I hope Joe Biden wins because I think he has a way of bringing the people back together. Right now we’re split by race, honestly. And that’s sad,” said a Black woman named Tenise who didn’t want to give her last name, after casting her early ballot at the Spectrum Arena voting station.
“This country has always been split by racism, racism’s been going on for the longest time,” her mother Annie said.
“Yes, but it’s more prominent this time. It’s more alive. It’s really out front and in your face more than anything. it’s not hidden anymore,” Tenise said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Annie said. “I believe if the Black voters are not very careful, if the Black voters don’t come out and make their decision, we are in the process of returning back to slavery,” Annie said.
I asked if they were hopeful, after a summer of protest that attracted so much attention. The two women said yes — that’s why they had voted. And, Annie said, why she prays on it every night.
Each swing state is important in its own way, but their unhappy partisan divisions seem all alike: as in the others I’ve visited this year, when you travel outside the city, you hear something different.
Gastonia is a half-hour away from Charlotte on the highway — it’s a smaller and more livedin looking town, with concealed carry gun courses offered at a downtown sporting shop, signs in business windows express the police association message “Back the Blue,” instead of “Black Lives Matter,” and a barber on the main street advertises stun guns and knives for sale in classic red-and-white script lettering painted in the window.
In 2016, Gastonia and the surrounding county voted for Trump by a two-thirds margin. President Trump held a rally there just one week ago and drew 23,000 or more people.
At the early voting location at the Gastonia Public Library, I met Jessica Crisp, wearing a “Law & Order” T-shirt. She cast the first vote of her life for Trump in 2016 because he was the first politician she ever liked, and now volunteers for the Republican party. She says first of all, the president’s strong “pro-life” position drives her support.
Beyond that, “this election is about actually trying to get a hold on this COVID thing and getting people back to work,” Crisp says. “To get back to normal, because right now, the cure is getting worse than the cause. People losing jobs, and businesses are closing and not going to be able to open. People are losing families.”
I ask her how people in the city down the road can feel so differently. She thinks it might be their Democratic mayor who wants to build affordable housing projects rather than wanting people to get jobs to improve their own lives. “And down here, we want a president that cares about his people, who puts God back into things, and praying, and pro life. We never had a president since I’ve been born that ever was that pro-life and cared about people.”
Crisp tells me she’s feeling confident in Trump winning the state, given the size of the crowds he’s been drawing and the energy at campaign events.
“Just this morning I got to see Ivanka Trump in person in Charlotte,” she says. “I really hope she runs for president some day.”