President Biden continues Democrats' long pursuit to win North Carolina
URSULA: Hi. This is Ursula (ph) in Boston, Mass. Yesterday, I graduated from Berklee College of Music. And tomorrow, I'm leaving to start my new job as a drummer in the Blue Man Group.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Oh, my God.
DEEPA SHIVARAM, HOST:
What?
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Oh, wow.
URSULA: This podcast was recorded at...
SHIVARAM: 12:34 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29, 2024.
URSULA: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be slightly in disbelief that my co-workers are now three tall, bald men painted blue that don't talk. But while I think about that, here's the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
SHIVARAM: (Laughter).
KEITH: Oh, my God. That is the most amazing...
SHIVARAM: Wait, that was awesome.
KEITH: ...First job out of college ever.
SHIVARAM: That might be one of my favorite time stamps of all time.
MONTANARO: We'll need a follow-up, though, when they actually have conversations behind the scenes.
KEITH: Ooh.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, for sure.
MONTANARO: What do they say?
(LAUGHTER)
SHIVARAM: Hey there, it's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
KEITH: I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
SHIVARAM: OK. So today on the show - Democrats' long elusive hope for a blue North Carolina. Tam, I'm going to start with you because you have been to North Carolina recently. You've been reporting from the state. Share with us what you have been hearing there.
KEITH: Let's start with some numbers, which I know people love on the radio.
MONTANARO: I do.
SHIVARAM: (Laughter).
KEITH: But 74,000 votes - that's what Joe Biden lost by in 2020. Seventy-four thousand votes split over all of the precincts in the state is fewer than 50 votes per precinct, and that is what Democrats are rallying behind. Now, let's talk about some reality. All recent polls show President Biden trailing badly in the state. Additionally, there is a long history of Democratic dreams being dashed in North Carolina.
SHIVARAM: Right.
KEITH: Former President Obama won in 2008. A Democrat at the top of the ticket hasn't won since then, and they also haven't won in several races for the Senate either. So in 2008, Republicans were like, oh, gosh, we were surprised. We will never be surprised again. It's really taken until 2022 for Democrats to learn that same message and to try to build an infrastructure on the ground to get their people out to vote because the numbers are pretty equal.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, I mean, like, margins still very, very close here - so what is the Biden campaign trying to do with this? I mean, what's their strategy in North Carolina?
KEITH: I was in Eastern North Carolina, which is a part of the state that has a large African American population and also had really bad voter turnout challenges among Democratic voters and especially Black voters in 2022 and in years before that, but it was a particularly acute challenge in the most recent midterm. While I was there, Jamie Harrison, the head of the Democratic National Committee came and opened up a campaign office. That was the 12th campaign office that the Biden campaign has opened in the state. The 13th was opened a day later.
So they are trying to be in the communities all over the state, trying to have a big presence. And part of this is a really concerted effort to not just try to turn out Black voters, but to try to persuade them that it is worth it to vote for President Biden.
MONTANARO: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that gives Democrats hope in North Carolina is the changing demography. I mean, this is a state that was long a Republican stronghold, and we've seen a big change in what's known as the Research Triangle in the central portion of the state. There's a bunch of universities there. You have a higher income, higher education section of people.
Now, you do also have this sort of re-sorting, where you have more of the rural areas more locked in for Republicans, and you're seeing this sort of change with whites with college degrees, which the Biden campaign is hoping to turn out. But Black voters are really, really important. When I talked to Democratic strategists in 2012 and 2016 and thinking about Obama's win in 2008 and whether or not demography was now destiny - meaning that Democrats were going to win North Carolina from here on out - they said, look, no other candidate could have won North Carolina than Barack Obama because of how much he juiced the Black vote. And at this point, it doesn't feel like, doesn't seem like, when we look at polling and Tam's reporting - that Biden just doesn't have the same sort of level of enthusiasm to vote for him with the Black community.
SHIVARAM: Yeah, Tam, I want to get into that a little bit because you've talked to so many voters when you were in North Carolina. I'm thinking about something that Vice President Kamala Harris has said a lot when she does fundraisers around the country, which is that - you know, their record. The Biden-Harris Administration is trying to say, you know, we have a lot that we've done for Black voters. We have a lot that we've done in our agenda for the first term, right? But they have to remind people who brung it to them. And I'm curious with, like, the voters you have talked to - particularly with Black voters - do they feel like they know who brung it to them - like, with the accomplishments that Biden and Harris are trying to tout here, basically?
KEITH: Let me give you the example that I just can't stop thinking about from this reporting trip. I went around this community called Rocky Mount with a woman named Kimberly Hardy. She is the second vice chair of the state Democratic Party, but she is on a mission to listen to Black voters and to hear what their concerns are. She goes around, and the first question she asks everybody she talks to is, why are Black folks not voting right now?
And the answer is a combination of things, including just feeling like their vote doesn't really matter, that the system doesn't work for them, that things just don't change no matter who's in office. So we were at this barbershop called Head Changerz, and she was talking to a barber named Cherita Evans. She goes by Storm. And she was trying to, you know, talk up all of President Biden's accomplishments - infrastructure, first female vice president - on and on and on. And then insulin comes up - $35 insulin.
SHIVARAM: Right.
KEITH: And so the two voices you will hear are Hardy making the case for Biden and Cherita Evans pushing back.
KIMBERLY HARDY: He just capped insulin prices for diabetics.
CHERITA EVANS: I don't know because my insurance want me to pay $1,000 a month for my insulin, and I ain't taking it 'cause I...
HARDY: Unless, you know, if we can get something changed on that.
EVANS: I can't - I'm not a - I can't afford it. You know what I'm saying?
HARDY: It's supposed to be capped at $35 a month. That's what the...
EVANS: Yeah, that's what I thought, but they want me to pay $1,000 a month.
KEITH: So here is this signature achievement...
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
KEITH: ...Of the Biden administration. It is an applause line for...
SHIVARAM: A huge one - he talks about it all the time.
KEITH: He talks about it all the time. And here is a woman who voted for Biden last time who, in theory, should be benefiting from $35 insulin. But you know what? It's complicated. So the $35 insulin cap is really for Medicare, not for the broader public, and she's not on Medicare 'cause she's not a senior citizen. But at least one of the drug companies voluntarily announced that they would drop their prices to $35. But there's this huge disconnect between what happens in Washington and what happens in people's lives.
MONTANARO: This is going to be the group of people who are going to really be determinative of who wins the election because everyone expects - all of the experts believe that this is going to be a lower-turnout election than 2020 - that Biden, you know, won 51% in 2020, but he's going to have to get enough of that coalition back to be able to win, and he's going to have to convince a lot of these kinds of voters that Tam is talking to to be able to come back on board who right now feel like they might sit on the sidelines.
KEITH: So let me put a period on this, though, because it sounds like Cherita Evans is not going to vote for Joe Biden, right? But in the end, after 30 minutes of conversation with Hardy, I'm finally like, I'm not polite. I'm going to ask you, how are you planning to vote? Are you even planning to vote? And she's like, oh, yeah, I'm voting for Biden. It's all about abortion. I don't want to have a man telling me what to do with my body. And then she starts telling the young man in her chair, getting his hair cut - and you should be voting for Biden for that very same reason.
SHIVARAM: (Laughter).
MONTANARO: Yeah, well...
SHIVARAM: Voters are famously really, really not complicated (laughter).
MONTANARO: And this is important because over the next few months, we're going to see if those voters become more engaged or not. You know, the other aspect here - and we talk a lot about Black voters in North Carolina and how important they are, and they are very important. They're about a quarter of the electorate. Biden won 92% of them. Obama won a slightly higher percentage, 95% of them according to exit polls. That might not make the biggest difference. It's important at the margins when you're talking about 74,000 votes.
But also, we should look at 18- to 29-year-olds, younger voters because the Obama campaign did a lot of work going around campus to campus to campus. And in that group, Obama won almost three-quarters of voters who were 18 to 29. There were nearly 1 in 5 voters. Biden only won less than 60% of that age group. So, you know, I think that's a real big place where they have a lot of problems. When we talk about Black voters, we're really specifically talking about younger Black voters, younger voters of color who are really not completely on board with Biden at this point.
SHIVARAM: There's so much to get into, but we are going to take a quick break, and we'll be back in a moment.
And we're back. And for all the trouble Democrats have had at the presidential level in North Carolina, there has been some success at winning the gubernatorial races there, and they're feeling pretty good about their chances again this year, possibly, given the current GOP candidate. Tam, Domenico, tell me about this person. His name is Mark Robinson. How is he impacting the race this year?
KEITH: Well, as Democrats like to say, he makes the ads for them. Robinson is a far-right MAGA conservative. He has said things about abortion, about women's place in the home, about religion, about - he's said things that are antisemitic. The list is very long. He is also quite charismatic. He is, you know, of the Trump mold in that respect, and he's a Black candidate. He is running against Josh Stein, who is a lot less charismatic. He is the state's current attorney general and sort of a protege of Governor Roy Cooper. And the Cook Political Report just moved this race from leans Democratic to toss up based on the polls. That said, this race hasn't really even been run yet.
MONTANARO: Well, I think that the - that this governor's race, the reason we kind of talk about it is because I think a lot of Democrats, lot of Democratic strategists think that this race could be something that could be an up-ballot help to Democrats because they think that a candidate like this who's a Republican, they feel like is so extreme that it could alienate suburban voters, the kinds of voters that they need to vote for Biden, who might not turn out otherwise or might not vote Democratic otherwise. So they're hoping that you get a fraction of people to maybe ticket split or to be able to turn out to then vote for Biden and help him across the finish line. It's a little bit of a stretch, I think, but I think that it's something that at least is what's kind of opened some eyes to put it on the map.
KEITH: Yeah. And this race really does put abortion on the ballot because Robinson has talked about wanting a more restrictive ban, and the current Democratic governor tried to veto legislation to put more restrictions on abortion. But there was a Republican supermajority in the legislature, so he was overruled. And that is a big dynamic both in the governor's race and all the way down to State House races.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. And is that giving them more optimism about doing well in North Carolina?
KEITH: Certainly, it raises the stakes. It makes the stakes very clear. I also followed around a candidate for the State House, a young man - he's 28 - named Dante Pittman, who's running for State House in the county next to where Rocky Mount is - in Wilson County. And the seat that he's running for was held by a Democrat until 2022, when Black turnout fell through the floor, and then a Republican won. And so he is trying to increase turnout for his own race. But also, he feels the pressure that this will also affect the presidential race and the gubernatorial race.
DANTE PITTMAN: We have some people here who are trying to portray an image as if, you know, folks have just changed their party affiliation and will never vote for a Democratic - that's not what happened. What happened is folks did not feel as though they had a reason to come out and vote. They weren't motivated to come out to the polls, and that's why we saw the change that we did.
SHIVARAM: And that's, like, the point of this whole election writ large - right? - that this is about enthusiasm. This is going to be about turnout, whether or not people stay home in November. And it goes back to the earlier thing we were talking about. Like, folks need to know why they should come out and vote for the Biden campaign if that's the message that Biden is trying to take to voters in North Carolina.
MONTANARO: Yeah, and I don't think that we should necessarily discount the fact that Trump's base are people who are fairly low propensity voters. White voters without college degrees have among the lowest turnout percentages of any group traditionally. So, you know, I think that both campaigns are going to have some issues in turning out the groups that they really need to turn out who tend to be voters who don't show up if it's not an election they're terribly interested in.
SHIVARAM: Zooming out, Domenico, I mean, how important is North Carolina for Biden's path to 270 electoral votes? We talk a lot about Midwestern states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, those combinations. Where does North Carolina fit into all of that?
MONTANARO: Well, there's a reason we talk about those three because Biden could win if he won the, quote-unquote, "blue wall" of those states that you mentioned without having to win any of the other states, you know...
SHIVARAM: Right.
MONTANARO: ...North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada. Those sort of Sun Belt states are sort of the emerging states that Democrats have looked to that have helped expand the map for them. So a North Carolina is important because if, for some reason, they were to lose a Wisconsin or a Michigan, they could substitute that. If they were to lose some of these other states, it's a really important place where they could maybe pick up some votes. Georgia is another state where Democrats are struggling right now because of similar demographic problems. So winning a North Carolina could help substitute there. You know, so they need to have as many possible paths to 270 as possible.
KEITH: If Biden is going to add a state, if he's going to expand his map, this is where it would be.
SHIVARAM: Yeah.
KEITH: However, it's a big if.
SHIVARAM: It's a big if.
MONTANARO: It's only seven states we're talking about here - hundreds of millions of dollars being spent.
SHIVARAM: Oof (ph), it is. All right. We're going to leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.
KEITH: I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
SHIVARAM: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
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