Trump is turning North Carolina blue. Why rest of the Republican ticket should be terrified.https://www.yahoo.com/news/down-ticket-4-north-carolina-000000801.htmlNorth Carolina was supposed to be a purple state. But Democrats are suddenly ahead in all the big races. What’s going on?
If you want to understand the larger dynamics at play in the 2016 election — and how they are reshaping the clash between Republicans and Democrats in real time, from the top of the ticket to the bottom — there’s no better place to look than North Carolina.
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Once upon a time, the Tar Heel State was reliably Republican, at least on the presidential level. Sure, Jimmy Carter — a southern governor with strong Evangelical ties — won there in 1976. But otherwise N.C. voted for every GOP nominee from Richard Nixon in 1968 to George W. Bush in 2004, and much of the time it wasn’t even close: George H.W. Bush trounced Michael Dukakis 16 percentage points in 1988, and his son defeated another Massachusetts Democrat, John Kerry, by more than a dozen points 16 years later.
That’s why it was such a big deal when Barack Obama inched past John McCain in North Carolina in 2008; his win seemed to signal some sort of shift. Still, Obama’s minuscule margin of victory — a mere 14,177 votes — suggested that, rather than voting Democratic from here on out, N.C. voters would be toggling back and forth between the parties. The fact that Mitt Romney recaptured the state in 2012 while losing nationally only confirmed the conventional wisdom: North Carolina might not be a solid red state any more, but it certainly hadn’t transformed into a solid blue state, either.
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According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey conducted between Aug. 4 and 10 by Marist College — one of only two firms awarded a statewide accuracy grade of “A” by FiveThirtyEight — Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by a staggering 9 percentage points in North Carolina. Down ballot, incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr is trailing Democratic challenger Deborah Ross by 2 points among registered voters, 46 percent to 44 percent. And in North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory is losing by 7 points to Democratic challenger Roy Cooper, who leads 51 percent to 44 percent.
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Then there’s the second factor to consider: Donald Trump.
The data tells the tale. According to Fox News,
Trump is currently pulling down a paltry 20 percent among Latinos — well shy of the 40 percent that George W. Bush won in 2004 or even Romney’s lackluster 27 percent. At the same time,
Clinton is trouncing Trump by 8.7 percentage points among college-educated whites — a demographic that Romney actually won by 14 percentage points four years ago.
A Republican presidential nominee who appealed to Latinos and college-educated whites — someone like, say, Marco Rubio — might have slowed North Carolina’s leftward momentum. (And Virginia’s, and Colorado’s — the demographic trends are similar.) By the same token, a nominee like Trump, who repulses these groups in particular, could have the power to speed it up — and perhaps drag the rest of the ticket down with him.
