Trump toils to lock down Tar Heel territory
Republican warns North Carolina that it’s going to get ‘sick and tired’ of him
If history is any guide — and it often hasn’t been in this unusual election year — Donald Trump will be in trouble if he fails to carry North Carolina in November’s presidential election.
Maybe that’s why he tells Tar Heel residents they’ll see him a lot this fall.
“I’m going to be in North Carolina so much that you’re going to get so sick and tired of me,” the businessman- turned-Republican-nominee told a cheering crowd of supporters Monday at a fairground arena near the Wake Forest University football stadium.
“We’ve got to win North Carolina,” Trump told the crowd.
As Hillary Clinton and the Democrats held their convention in Philadelphia, Trump spent two days in North Carolina telling voters that bad trade deals bleed their state of lifelong manufactur- ing jobs.
In arguing that “we’re going to bring our jobs back to North Carolina,” Trump talks to a state that has been a key part of the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” for more than four decades — where a changing economy and electorate make it a prime turnaround target for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
The state’s 15 electoral votes are essential for a Republican candidate seeking the 270 needed to win. “Trump needs North Carolina to get to 270 more than Clinton needs North Carolina to get to 270,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina.
In many ways, he said, North Carolina is ripe for Trump’s trade message: The state’s blue-collar workers, many of them in the textile and furniture manufacturing industries, were hit hard by the financial crisis and recession of 2008. They are receptive to the Republican businessman’s message that “bad” free-trade deals led to the loss of manufacturing jobs to other countries.
“North Carolina used to be a tobacco and textile state — and now both of them have been decimated,” said Diana Gwyn, 58, a retired probation and parole officer from Mount Airy who likes Trump’s “law and order” theme.
Trade agreements are “even affecting furniture manufacturing,” she said.
During his rally in Winston-- Salem, Trump attributed the state’s lost manufacturing jobs to “incompetent” federal officials negotiating poor trade deals and allowing China to get away with unfair practices.
Trump touched on the economy during a speech Tuesday in Charlotte to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, telling veterans, “Our terrible trade deals must be renegotiated.”
He discussed his plans to im- prove veterans health care, saying the country must “never again break our sacred commitment” to those who have fought for the United States.
Since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, only two Democratic presidential candidates have taken North Carolina: fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Clinton is trying to follow the Obama playbook, appealing to voters who have flooded into the state to fill the state’s new economy, including research and development, pharmaceuticals and banking and finance. This month, she made her first joint appearance with President Obama in Charlotte, the city where the Democrats held their convention four years ago.
Blasting Trump as lacking the qualifications and temperament to be president, Clinton told people in Charlotte, “This election is our chance to say our country is better than this.”
Rising numbers of collegeeducated white-collar workers, single women and minority voters propelled Obama to a narrow victory in North Carolina eight years ago.