Joe Biden is eyeing North Carolina in 2024. He has work to do | Opinion
Preston Blakely, mayor of the town of Fletcher in conservative western North Carolina, has a message for President Joe Biden.
“As a 28-year-old Black man who’s a mayor in a very rural part of the state, I find a lot of success knocking on doors and talking about the day-to-day issues that really impact my constituency,” Blakely said.
Biden is hoping to succeed where many Democrats trying to be president have failed — winning North Carolina. The Biden campaign is planning to “fully invest” in North Carolina in 2024, and it expects the state to be competitive this election cycle, The Washington Post reported in May.
Of course, we’ve heard that before. Despite many enthusiastic and expensive efforts, no Democrat has won the presidential vote in North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008, the same year North Carolina last elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the investment.
“The song remains the same for North Carolina,” Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said. “It’s a purple state. It has not been much of a swing state. It’s right on the razor’s edge, but it just hasn’t quite tipped, so I think it’s a smart investment by the Biden administration.”
For that investment to yield the desired return, though, Democrats need to learn from past mistakes — and from their few successes.
A successful Biden run in North Carolina does three things, Cooper said. It increases turnout in traditionally Democratic areas, focuses on issues like abortion to swing voters in suburban areas, and stops the bleeding in rural areas.
Donald Trump won North Carolina by just a 1.34% margin in 2020 — about 75,000 votes — his narrowest victory in any state. In theory, it shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to find another 75,000 votes, but they’ve been looking in the wrong places.
Douglas Wilson, a longtime Democratic strategist, said one of the most important things that the Biden campaign and other Democrats can do is just show up.
“I know Democrats in Warren County, they’re still talking about the fact that President Obama came and campaigned there,” Wilson said. “And I’ve heard people in Robeson County say the reason they’re voting for Trump is because Trump came to Robeson County, with Marine One landing on the high school football field, and really showed interest in the people there.”
Blakely echoed that sentiment, encouraging the Biden campaign to “meet voters where they’re at.”
Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina was fueled by gains in turnout among Black voters and first-time voters, many of them younger voters. Both of those groups disproportionately lean Democratic, but the challenge is generating enough enthusiasm for them to show up to vote.
But the key to generating voter enthusiasm is effective messaging, and too often, Democrats seem to find themselves playing defense because they’ve lost control of the narrative. It’s not just about telling voters why they shouldn’t vote for the other guy. It’s about telling voters what Democrats done for North Carolina and will again.
That’s something state party chair Anderson Clayton mentioned to me in a conversation earlier this year.
“We need to get our fight back, honestly,” she said. “We’ve got to be more dogmatic. Otherwise, Republicans are going to keep controlling the message waves and keep the hold that they have over North Carolina forever, unless this party gets its act together.”
Different issues are going to matter to different people, so the Biden campaign should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. But the average voter cares a lot about the economy, about health care, about public safety, strategists say. Republicans tend to do a better job on those issues, and Democrats can’t afford to cede that ground.
“I think what we did well in 2008 is explain how we’re going to solve kitchen table issues in layman’s terms,” Wilson said. “We need to come in with one message from the president down to someone running for school board, and just keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it and make sure that message is something that resonates with people today.”
A successful presidential campaign is a massive operation, one that takes coordination across thousands of people at all different levels — local, state, federal. The Biden campaign already seems to be zeroing in on North Carolina, more than a year before the election, and that’s promising.
But it’s one thing to make plans and another to execute them. Biden would hardly be the first Democrat to turn his eye toward the Tar Heel state. But he has work to do if he wants to be the first one in a while to swing and not miss.
This story was originally published July 18, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Joe Biden is eyeing North Carolina in 2024. He has work to do | Opinion."
