| 摘要 | Yes, I suppose President Trump’s Monday night rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, did push Republican nominee Dan Bishop across the finish line in his 51-49% victory over Democrat Dan McCready in the North Carolina 9th Congressional District special election.
That’s good news for Republicans, but this is a district that voted 54-42% for Trump in 2016 and 55-44% for Mitt Romney in 2012. A straight-line extrapolation from this week’s results has Trump significantly weaker than when he carried North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes, 50-46%. That’s good news for Democrats.
Actually, I think there is cautionary news — yellow lights — for both parties in results in a district that happens to include affluent suburbs, somewhat less affluent exurbs, and rural and small town areas in approximately equal numbers. Some 35% of votes were cast in the district’s portion of Mecklenburg County (affluent Charlotte and close-in suburbs), 32% in exurban Union County to the east, and 33% in the smaller counties farther east, extending to Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg, and Robeson County, whose population is 39% Lumbee Indian, 26% white, 24% black, 9% Hispanic, and 1% Asian.
(On how Trump carried the Lumbees, check out the reporting of the Washington Examiner’s Dan Allott.)
One way to gauge attitudes in the different areas is to look at each of these three areas and compare the 2019 results with those of the 2016 congressional race, in which Republican Rob Pittenger won over a noncompetitive Democrat 58-42%. Pittenger’s lost the 2018 Republican primary, and the Republican nominee’s narrow lead in November was voided because of apparent election fraud by a Republican operative.
In upscale Mecklenburg County, even though Bishop represented part of the area in the state Senate, he lost 43-56%. That’s a big contrast with Pittenger’s 2016 margin there, when he won the area 58-42%. This is cautionary news for Republicans: Trump continues to cost them many traditional Republican votes in the upscale portions of large metropolitan areas. As Cook Political Report House analyst David Wasserman tweeted: “Last night makes it clear: there’s a five-alarm fire for Trump in Whole Foods suburbs.”
Exurban Union County, in contrast, remained Republican, but by a reduced margin. It gave Bishop a 21-point margin, and a popular vote margin bigger than McCready’s in Mecklenburg. But Pittenger had done much better there, winning 68-32%. This is cautionary news for both parties. Exurban areas remain Republican, but not by margins as large as before the Trump presidency.
The rural counties seemed to vote exactly the same in the 2019 and 2016 congressional races. There’s a strong Democratic tradition, going back to the Civil War, as you head eastward from Union County. Bishop lost these counties 49.5-49.9% this year; Pittenger had lost them 49.9-50.1% in 2016. Despite this similarity, I see three cautionary notes for Democrats here.
One is that this is the part of the district with the highest percentage of racial minorities, particularly in Robeson County, which gave the Democrat only a 1.1-point margin. Far from being poison with racial minorities, the Trump brand may be an elixir. Black and other minority voters may be noticing the all-time (since statistics started in 1972) low black unemployment numbers.
The other note is that turnout in the rural areas in this special election was especially light. Turnout as compared to the 2016 presidential year House race was down 38% in affluent Mecklenburg, 41% in exurban Union, and 49% in the rural counties. That suggests that there’s more room for increased turnout in the rural areas, and the Trump campaign seems to be moving on this more than the Democrats so far.
Which leads to the third cautionary note for Democrats. Bishop was clearly identified with Trump in all three regions, especially in Mecklenburg County, where he lost areas he had been carrying as a state senator. In contrast, Democrat McCready could run as a moderate, fashioning his positions on issues to local sensibilities and not being stuck with unpopular stands like those taken by many Democratic presidential candidates this year.
But the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, will be. Consider another post-election David Wasserman tweet: McCready’s “poor showing among rural Trump Dems (yes, they’re a real constituency) cost Dems a pickup. And frankly, it’s easy to see a very liberal, coastal Dem presidential nominee performing much worse than McCready (D) and Clinton among these voters. Dems underestimate how much room there still is to fall with these anti-elite voters at their own peril.”
So, yellow lights facing those on both roads on the intersection. |
