Harris ticket energizes rural NC voters, but will it be enough?
Buncombe County Democratic Party Chair Kathie Kline, seen here at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, says she’s optimistic about her party’s fortunes in the upcoming General Election. Cory Vaillancourt photo.
The long and winding road to the White House passes through North Carolina, but in this swing state of nearly 11 million people, that road is more likely than in any other to be gravel or dirt.
Lately, Republicans have had an easier time reaching rural voters across the nation with their messaging, but a shift in North Carolina’s Democratic Party leadership over the past two years has resulted in a new focus on political organizing out in the country, away from traditional concrete-sidewalked strongholds.
“Our campaign is doing the work to meet voters where they are, including in rural communities — which is why we have opened offices in rural areas from Sylva to Hendersonville in the west to Kinston and Rocky Mount in the east,” said Allie Zuliani, spokesperson for the North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign.
Local party leaders say Vice President Kamala Harris’ entry into the race has their growing corps of volunteers fired up, but they’ll still have to overcome logistical and ideological considerations if they’re to have any hope of turning some or all of that red clay blue.
Tucked away in the westernmost corner of North Carolina, Cherokee County is home to just 20,000 people spread across 455 square miles of rugged, somewhat mountainous terrain. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, its residents are classified as 100% rural. In both 2016 and 2020, the county went for Donald Trump with around 77% of the vote.
It’s an unlikely place to see a pocket of energy for Democrats emerge, but party chair Diane Snyder says that’s exactly what’s happening.
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“Our party has been kind of quiet. Then I took over and we changed that,” Snyder said. “We have had about half a dozen events. Every time it grows a little bit more, and I get a little bit more excited.”
Snyder pointed to a recent event in conjunction with three other rural counties that drew around 80 people — a relatively large number. Lots of folks, Snyder said, are hesitant to identify as Democrats in such a ruby red region, but just the other day, a woman showed up at the party’s headquarters with a $500 check, saying she wanted to help. Another came in off the street and volunteered to talk to rural voters on the phone. For the first time, the party is engaging in door-to-door campaigning, and for Snyder, there’s a simple reason behind it all.
“Since Kamala declared for the presidency, I have gotten like 12 or 14 people a week signing on to my newsletter without me doing anything,” Snyder said. “They’re just signing up. People are starting to get the word out and starting to look for Democrats in our area.”
Buncombe County, situated along a broad river basin, couldn’t be more different than Cherokee County culturally. Slightly larger and home to more than 270,000 people anchored around Asheville, Buncombe sits near the eastern gateway to North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, is a liberal island awash in a sea of red and voted for Democratic presidential candidates in 2016 and 2020 with totals of 54% and 60%, respectively. Counterintuitively, Buncombe County does share something in common with Cherokee County more than two hours’ drive to the west — a higher-than-average number of rural residents.
It’s estimated that 14% to 21% of the United States population can be classified as rural. Buncombe is around 24%.
“Our volunteer inquiries before President Biden made the decision not to run, if we were lucky, were 20 to 24 a week,” said Kathie Kline, chair of the Buncombe County Democratic Party since October. “On Sunday night that decision was made by Biden and the following week we had 144 inquiries. Every week since, we’ve had between 50 and 75. People are just coming out of the woodwork.”
And with a half-dozen or more active Democratic campaigns in the county, those volunteers are being put right to work; the most recent round of Republican gerrymandering has put pressure on Democratic incumbent Buncombe Rep. Lindsey Prather, whose district now includes rural precincts she didn’t have before. If North Carolina Democrats are to have any hope of breaking the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly, they’ll need to keep Prather in Raleigh.
“Our GOTV is going to be continuing, lots of phone banking, lots of events,” Kline said. “We have a whole lot of canvassers lined up.”
With 33% of its residents living in rural areas North Carolina is second only to Texas, which isn’t considered a swing state due to two Trump wins ranging from 6 to 9 points. North Carolina is, however, because Trump’s two wins here — by 3.66% and 1.34% in 2016 and 2020 respectively — have both come without him earning 50% of the vote.
That makes North Carolina’s percentage of rural voters the highest among all swing states. Wisconsin is second with 30%, Michigan has 25%, Georgia 25%, Pennsylvania 21%, Arizona 12% and Nevada just 6%. What makes North Carolina different, per Rep. Wesley Harris (D-Mecklenburg), is that urban Democratic power centers in North Carolina aren’t nearly as large as those in the other swing states. That means Democrats here can’t afford to ignore rural areas.
“If you want to actually be able to govern North Carolina, you have to build that geographic coalition, which no other swing state really has for Democrats in the sense that [other states like Michigan] can just focus on the cities,” said Harris, who certainly has a thing for numbers. Born in rural Alexander County, he’s the General Assembly’s only Ph. D.-level economist, specializes in public finance, wrote his dissertation on political geography and the urban/rural divide and is currently running for state treasurer. “They can turn out the vote in the cities and they can win their state, and they can govern in their state, but in North Carolina, you have to be able to build that geographic coalition, which I think gives us the potential to show people how to bridge that urban/rural divide in a way that no other state can do.”
Bridging that divide has been the subject of intense discussion in North Carolina for at least the last decade, but the movement has become a higher priority just in the last two.
Macon County native and Harvard grad Canyon Woodward wrote a book in 2022 with Chloe Maxmin detailing Maxmin’s unlikely successes in a pair of Maine electoral contests. In 2018, with Woodward serving as her campaign manager, Democrat Maxmin won the Pine Tree State’s most rural House district by six points. Two years later and again with Woodward, she won a state Senate district by two points.
In their “tough-love letter to the Democratic Party” titled “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on it,” Woodward and Maxmin opine that the Democratic Party has abandoned rural America and posit a path forward.
The road map is simple — show up, shut up and listen.
In February 2023, North Carolina Democrats elected a 25-year-old activist to chair the state party. Anderson Clayton was born and raised in rural Roxboro, population 8,100 and graduated from Appalachian State University with degrees in journalism and political science after serving as student body president there. Clayton went on to work as a field organizer for a number of Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 and was elected Person County Democratic Party Chair in 2021.
Initially, she was viewed as a long shot to become state chair, but her second-round victory over incumbent and former state House Rep. Bobbie Richardson, who had represented Franklin and Nash counties in the General Assembly, was seen as a response by rural electors to the fruitless big-city mentality of the state party’s upper echelons that’s resulted in near-total Republican domination of the state.
“You got to get out here and talk to people,” Clayton told The Smoky Mountain News at an event in Haywood County last month. “I don’t think voters are monolithic, and I don’t think the party should treat them as such. Rural people want to shake the hand of somebody, they want to introduce themselves, they want to be able to have that conversation.”
That conversation, though, can sometimes be a difficult one to have in rural Appalachia, due to a substantial cleavage between national Democratic messaging coming out of liberal power centers like Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and the more conservative messages carried by moderate Democrats in the South. All the campaign donations and volunteers and postcards and phone calls in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if voters don’t want to hear what Democrats are trying to tell them on abortion, guns and certain social issues.
“Here’s the importance of having local candidates and local representatives in your area, because if not, you get the national narrative,” Rep. Harris said after speaking at a delegate breakfast at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 21. “We’re a diverse big tent, but having candidates everywhere is how you break through — with people that fit their community, fit their region and go out and talk about what their people need. What works best for Charlotte isn’t going to work in Haywood County, isn’t going to work in Swain County. They have different needs, they have different cultures, and we need to be okay with those differences. That’s how you break through the noise, because otherwise you’re just an echo chamber.”
Local party chairs like Cherokee County’s Snyder say they’re feeling the reverberations of that sentiment. Although her county’s Republican legislators are popular, powerful and enjoy solidly conservative districts — House Majority Whip Karl Gillespie’s performed at 71.9% based on voter performance from 2016 to 2022 according to nonpartisan mapping site davesredistricting.org, while Sen. Kevin Corbin’s district boasts more than 62% — a solid rural push could help Democratic congressional candidate Caleb Rudow of Buncombe County in his race against incumbent Rep. Chuck Edwards, of Hendersonville.
Edwards’ 11th performs at 53.8% Republican and his first contest against Asheville Democrat Jasmine Beach-Ferrara in 2022 saw him come away with 53.79% of the vote. Beach-Ferrara’s 44.51% total wasn’t close; however, she bested 2020 Dem nominee Moe Davis’ 42.34% take. Davis in turn topped the 38.75% total earned by 2018 Dem nominee Phillip Price, who’d increased Dem share of the vote from Rick Bryson’s 35.91% in 2016. Although faces have changed since 2016 — Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, now Edwards — and the 11th has been slightly redrawn multiple times, the growing Democratic base has benefitted from recent campaign activity.
“A lot of retirees come to rural North Carolina, so we’re trying to focus on things like Social Security, Medicare, things that we depend on,” Snyder said. “Right now, we don’t even have an obstetrics hospital. If you want to have a baby in Cherokee County, you don’t. You go somewhere else. We have no [broadband] internet because we’re rural and we’re mountainous and it’s harder to get into our mountains to put that stuff in. Who wants to have a new business come to our area when they don’t have a way to get the word out? I think that puts us behind.”
It’s a big “if,” but if Democrats have been showing up, shutting up, listening to their rural constituents and messaging in a way that reaches rural voters — Kamala Harris, Caleb Rudow and a plethora of down-ballot candidates stand to benefit in the west, and all across this rural state.
“I feel really optimistic about it,” Kline said. “I also feel that a lot of people may become complacent, because there is so much enthusiasm and there is so much press. We run the risk of a lot of people who don’t want to dial on their phones or don’t want to knock on doors. Our concern is that they may stay home and not help us. We need everyone, all the boots on the ground. We don’t want to hold anything back. We have got to push hard from this moment all the way through till the polls close on Nov. 5.”
