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Region will have role in White House run, obervers say

By Priscilla Melchior
The Daily Reflector

Saturday, October 11, 2008

If North Carolina is a battleground state in this year’s presidential election, eastern North Carolina looks to be a tactical key to victory.

National candidates aiming for North Carolina wins this year have bombarded the East regularly, from the spring visit by former President Bill Clinton to the October rally in support of vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. Sandwiched between were primary campaign stops by presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

That’s just in Greenville. Campaigns this year have paid an unprecedented amount of attention to the entire region: Wilmington, Fayetteville, Kinston, Jacksonville, Rocky Mount, Wilson — the list goes on.

That’s because, political experts say, if you’re going to win North Carolina, you must nail down the vote east of I-95.

“It’s a very important area of the state,” said Buzz Jacobs, southeastern region manager for the McCain-Palin campaign. “The fact that we chose to send Sarah Palin to eastern North Carolina shows how important those voters are to our campaign.”

Strategists are parsing numbers as fast as they can go, trying to settle in on predicting a winner when polls show a virtual tie. They’re eyeing the state’s explosive growth since 1990 — nearly 2 million new residents — and the more than 500,000 new voters who’ve signed up since Jan. 1. They point to metropolitan areas such as Charlotte, the Triad, the Triangle. They discuss the youth vote, the African-American vote.

And then they turn to eastern North Carolina.

“Yes, we are seeing the demographics change, but what we know is, the East is an identifiable area where the road map has been laid in the past,” said National Review columnist Doug Heye. “Is its voting block power diluted? The Clinton campaign model suggested that it wasn’t.”

Heye served as communications director for N.C. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican, both during his 2004 campaign and later in the Senate. Heye argued in a column last week that if McCain wants to take North Carolina, he should look to the campaign strategy employed by Hillary Clinton in her primary race against Obama: win the East.

“The East has been a critical battleground for votes from voters registered as Democrats,” Heye said, “but Reagan fought for those voters, and Helms certainly did.”

The Clintons saw that, Heye pointed out, and moved to solidify a conservative base of Democrats unhappy with the more liberal Obama. They needed Eastern North Carolina if they wanted the primary.

But that, argues Ferrel Guillory of the University of North Carolina, is where any strategic similarity should end.

“In a Democratic primary, the state tilts toward the East,” he said. “If you’re going to campaign in North Carolina in a Democratic primary, you’ve got to pay attention to Cumberland, Robeson, Pitt — they’re in the top 10 counties.”

But in the general election, he said, there are different dynamics at work. Studies from his Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life, show an odd dichotomy.

“It sounds kind of contradictory,” he said, “but Republicans do better than Democrats in the East. Go back and look (at the last presidential election). Whereas the Democrats did fairly well in the metropolitan areas, the Republicans did better among the white, small town, rural voters. They were the George Bush majority, and he bolstered that majority by winning the conservative white folks east of Raleigh.”

Heye makes a similar argument, pointing out that his candidate in 2006, Republican Richard Burr, collected his second highest block of votes from the northeastern corner of the state.

But U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a Democrat who represents North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, says that’s about to change.

“The rules of yesteryear are gone,” he said, “and the rule book no longer applies. There’s a new dynamic.”

Whether that new dynamic is enough to push Obama over the top, as Butterfield predicts, remains to be seen, but at least one other prominent Democrat agrees.

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wls

10/13/2008 11:30:25 AM

If the media and the nation did not just focus on the Democratic and Republican Parties. I would in fact vote for an Independent in office. To me, McCain does not want to change the way things are going here. Obama is blowing a lot of smoke up our ***** to win a lot of the votes. If I vote in this Election I am going to pick Obama, since Republicans have destroyed our economy.

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