Anger with GOP works for and against Trump
President Barack Obama swooped into the heart of liberal North Carolina this week to drive home an increasingly crucial point about the Nov. 8 elections: with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump running neckand-neck, and a complex political situation threatening both Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and Sen. Richard Burr, North Carolina could be among the most crucial states in deciding both the White House and the Senate.
“All the progress that we’ve made over the past eight years, all the progress we hope to make over the next eight years, all of that goes out the window if we don’t win this election,” Obama told a student-heavy audience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “I hate to put a little pressure on you, but the fate of the republic rests on your shoulders.”
Other Democrats at the podium depicted North Carolina’s situation in similar lifeor-death terms.
“For decades, you could travel across this country, tell people you were from North Carolina, and the questions you would start getting would be about our great universities, or our Research Triangle Park (in and around Raleigh), or our mountains or our beaches,” said Roy Cooper, who’s in a close race to unseat McCrory. “Now the question you get is, ‘what in the world is going on in North Carolina?’ ”
Indeed, the Tar Heel State has produced many negative headlines in recent years. There was the so-called Bathroom Bill, prohibiting transgender people from using their public facilities of choice. There were allegations of voter suppression targeted at African-Americans, which were upheld in July by a federal court — and which are back in the news this week with a lawsuit alleging thousands of voters have improperly been struck from electoral rolls.
“This is our Selma and we will not back down,” vowed William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP.
On abortion, criminal justice, social assistance, Medicaid and other issues, McCrory has become something of an all-purpose bogeyman for progressives. And his administration, formed in 2013, has been a significant departure for North Carolina, according to Jason Roberts, a political science professor at UNC.
Twenty years ago, he said, North Carolina politics “was a combination of traditional Southern Democrats who were somewhat moderate on most issues — except for race and civil rights, but otherwise were fairly reasonable; and a set of Rockefeller-type Republicans who were probusiness but not dogmatic on social issues.”
More and more Southern Democrats gradually became Southern Republicans, says Roberts, allowing McCrory to triumph even as the state’s population rapidly grew in ways disadvantageous for the GOP: younger, and much more urban and Latino. Now, the demographics and the Bathroom Bill may be catching up to him. Some Republicans are annoyed because of the job and economic losses attributed to the legislation. Everyone seems to be annoyed that the NCAA pulled this year’s scheduled March Madness games in protest. “Imagine if the prime minister of Canada managed to get (the NHL) to pull out of Canada,” says Roberts of McCrory’s situation.
It could all shake out in strange ways: in a Wednesday podcast, NPR’s Asma Khalid reported sitting in on a focus group that found both Trump and would-be Democratic senator Deborah Ross could benefit from McCrory’s woes: participants wanted to punish the state GOP for bringing this nonsense on them; and they wanted a businessman president, Trump, to avoid future nonsense.
Still, the promise of relative normalcy is Clinton’s greatest asset. And on Thursday, Trump rolled into the Charlotte suburb of Concord to deliver the exact opposite: the wall with Mexico, at Mexican expense; American-made iPhones; his opponent both vanquished and imprisoned.
“Lock her up! Lock her up!” the crowd roared, unbidden. (The topic was Obamacare.) “Did you ever see anything like what’s going on right now?” asked Trump.
Nope — and of course, that’s Trump’s greatest asset. In Chapel Hill, Obama spoke as if he still might be able to convince whatever Trump-intending voters were listening that their man was simply beyond the pale, unthinkable, an impossibility.
“Look, I am obviously a partisan Democrat, I understand that. But we’re not Democrats or Republicans first, we’re Americans,” Obama pleaded. “And there are certain standards of behaviour that we should expect out of our leaders” — not assaulting women and insulting veterans, for example.
“If you disrespect the Constitution before you’re elected president, and you threaten to shut down the press when it writes stories you don’t like, or you threaten to throw your opponent in jail without any due process” — here Obama sort of chuckled incredulously — “then imagine what you’ll do when you actually have the power to violate the Constitution along those lines!”
Electing this man just isn’t who Americans are, Obama insisted, just as state Democrats insisted re-electing McCrory wouldn’t be who North Carolinians are. But at this point, surely it’s folly for any Republican or Democrat to lay claim to understanding what America is right now.
“You’re five days away from the change you’ve been waiting for your entire life,” Trump promised a thunderous crowd in Concord. Real Clear Politics’ latest average of polls has him up by 0.2 per cent in North Carolina, and down 1.7 per cent nationally — well within anyone’s margin of error.
IMAGINE IF THE PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA MANAGED TO GET (THE NHL) TO PULL OUT OF CANADA. — JASON ROBERTS, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR AT UNC