BOOM AND BUST
A trip through one of this year’s most competitive swing states shows there are two Americas, and the dividing line is education
MAGNOLIA, N.C.— Sally Quinn Whaley, devout Baptist, knows just what will fix her failing country: Christian leadership. But when Sunday comes around, she doesn’t always go to church to pray for it.
She lives 15 kilometres away. She can’t afford the gas for the old pickup.
She can’t afford enough food, either, even though she does her grocery shopping at the dollar store. Until she can find another job, she’ll keep eating twice a day.
There are no jobs right now in rural Duplin County, North Carolina, not even at 5-per-cent unemployment. Not for someone like her, a tiny, beaten-down 75-year-old graduate of only the “college of hard knocks.”
After 36 years of growing tobacco and then more years chopping wood and collecting eggs and doing whatever else came along, Quinn Whaley got a decent position bagging groceries for a while, then quit to take care of a dying friend, then couldn’t persuade the store to take her back. She is now on a list for a job at the recycling facility that isn’t hiring.
Until an opportunity materializes, she puts her faith in God. And she plants.
In front of the 118-year-old wood house where she was born, the one she lost to the bank and got back with a daunting mortgage, is a garden where she and her “wore-out shoulders” grow potatoes, okra, watermelon and cantaloupe.
It helps supplement the dollar store macaroni and cheese.
“First of the month, I pay out my bills. Then I don’t usually have enough to eat the rest of the month. So I grow a garden. The Lord helps me to grow a garden,” she said the other day, wearing a blue denim shirt tucked into blue jeans. “That helps my children, too. And my neighbours.”
She is disillusioned with politics, and she doesn’t think her vote counts. With no TV or radio at home, she still doesn’t know much about this Donald Trump character, the Republican presidential candidate who held a rally last month in the little county of farmers and pork and poultry processors. But he’ll probably be her choice if she decides to go to the polls.
She knows she will never vote for Hillary Clinton, a woman who has been in government a long time. She wants a change.
“If we had more Christian leaders,” she said, “our country would come back up. But as it is, it’s sinking.” Not for everyone. Just over an hour away, in a Raleigh building just up the street from a cupcake shop, Zach Milburn, a gregarious 25-year-old in a red collared shirt, sat in a cluttered office in front of the wide computer screen he uses to print money.
Milburn knows hard work, too. After he graduated from business school at N.C. State University in 2013, he put in seven painful days a week as a mover. Then he sold furniture on Craigslist. Then he did seven days a week driving for Uber.
The typical millennial struggle. But he had computer skills. And, it turned out, he lived in a boom town.
A year ago, he and his 23-year-old brother, Geoff, a skilled coder, founded LaunchLab, a company making custom web applications for fellow startups. They generated revenue beyond their wildest dreams — $250,000 — while spending much of their time working on the separate software project they see as their real future.
Eighty per cent of their business was local. Raleigh’s tech scene is exploding, bringing with it hip bars and cafés and what seems to be a new building every week. The Milburns have so many requests for work that they have to turn down a project at least that often. Six months in, they set a $25,000 minimum.
“I talk to a lot of people, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, in this economy you guys are doing really well.’ And I’m like, ‘In this economy?’ ” said Zach, a Bernie Sanders devotee who is voting for Hillary Clinton. “It seems like a pretty good economy right now.”
There are, it seems, two American economies. The dividing line is education.
According to a Georgetown University study, 8.4 million of 11.6 million jobs created in the wake of the recession went to people with bachelor’s degrees. Three million went to people with some college. A mere 80,000 went to people with a high school education.
If it seems as though Clinton and Trump are not only prescribing different economic solutions but describing different economic worlds, they are. And, Trump’s serial exaggeration momentarily aside, neither of them is really wrong.
“For those with at least some college education, the job market is ro- bust,” the study said. “By contrast, workers with a high school diploma or less hear about an economic recovery and wonder what people are talking about.”
The presidential election has been fought over every conceivable manner of identity: race, religion, gender. But educational attainment, too, has fuelled the polarization in federal politics.
The gulf is particularly vivid in North Carolina, one of the year’s most competitive swing states.
In a New York Times poll in September, white voters with a degree preferred Clinton 39 per cent to Trump’s 38 per cent. White voters without a degree, conversely, preferred Trump 66 per cent to 17 per cent. Clinton’s support was concentrated in thriving cities, Trump’s in lagging rural regions having trouble retaining not only jobs but also people, hospitals and schools.
“Whether you’re in Raleigh or Charlotte,” said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College, “you drive 30 miles in any direction and you see a very different North Carolina.”
For many people with college degrees, especially in urban areas such as Raleigh, the economy seems like something in the ballpark of the comeback story described by President Barack Obama. For many people without degrees, especially in rural and once-industrial communities, it resembles the failure outlined in Trump speeches.
There is a vigorous debate about the extent to which the rise of Trump has been driven by struggling white voters’ “economic anxiety” rather than racial anxiety or prejudice. The factors can be hard to disentangle.
There is no disputing the growing divergence of the educational haves and have-nots.
“I have a bunch of buddies with various degrees, construction management and things like that, who all ended up working in the tech industry because it’s such a growing field here in Raleigh,” said Evan Wykoff, 25, an undecided voter and salesman for Citrix with a degree in hotel management. “There’s jobs falling off trees in this industry here.”
“I do construction. And nobody wants to spend any money right now, because they want to hold on to what they got, because they’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said undecided voter Robbie Bostic, 39, a Trump skeptic, as he shopped for groceries in Kenansville.
“It makes me sad that I ain’t able to provide what I need to for my girls. They’re provided for what they need, but I can’t provide anything that they really want.”