NC’s top Democratic, Republican party leaders disagree on the impact of swapping Biden for Harris

As political insiders scramble to divine how President Joe Biden’s last-minute decision not to seek reelection this year will shake up the presidential race, North Carolina’s top Democratic and Republican bosses are painting very different pictures of what it means.

North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Jason Simmons said that nothing will change if Democrats nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to take over for Biden in the presidential race. Republicans can tie all of the attacks they had planned to use against Biden to Harris, he said, since she’s been there for every minute of his administration. And she should face additional scrutiny, he added, over whether she had conspired to cover up any issues on Biden’s part.

“The Democrat Party is still without its candidate, and in complete disarray,” Simmons told WRAL News. “Whoever their candidate is, they’re still going to have to address — especially if it’s Kamala Harris, who has been an enabler for Joe Biden, and really, we look at what Joe Biden has done the last three to four years, it’s been destructive both on our economy as well as our society — they’re gonna have to address those questions.”

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton, however, said a Harris nomination would change everything. It’s not just the record-setting donations of $81 million in a single day that poured in to Democratic coffers following Biden’s announcement that he was endorsing Harris in his stead, but also her potential to inspire voters who may not have been as enthused by Biden as they now are by Harris.

“She’s always been the champion of issues that young people right now — that my generation — is seeing in this country,” Clayton told WRAL News, listing abortion rights and LGBTQ rights as two key examples of that. She said Harris championed those issues in her previous roles as a U.S. senator and California attorney general, even before becoming vice president.

“Young voters see a president, or the potential of a president, that has always been able to actually get [things] done,” Clayton added.

Ever since Barack Obama in 2008 became the only Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter, local Democrats have been chasing — with little success — the “Obama coalition” of young people and rural Black voters who came to the polls in force in 2008 but have not voted in as large numbers since then. Harris likely offers Democrats a better shot at energizing those voters than Biden or 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, each of whom lost North Carolina to former president Donald Trump, who’s now running for the third straight election.

At 59, Harris is almost two full decades younger than Trump. With Biden out, the 78-year-old Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history. Harris would also be the first Black woman ever nominated for president by a major party, and just the second Black major party nominee ever, after Obama.

Clayton noted the explosion of social media memes — many of them coconut-themed, after a viral video of a Harris speech referencing a coconut tree that Republicans unearthed for an attack ad, but which Democrats have since adopted as pro-Harris symbolism. And she noted pop stars from multiple generations are now backing Harris to their fans, from Beyonce to Charlie XCX.

“I think that the energy has shifted in a generous direction towards the vice president,” Clayton said. “… She’s tapping into something that’s in the zeitgeist right now. It’s connecting politics and pop culture.”

Simmons and the GOP are more interested in connecting Harris with the border and the Biden administration’s immigration policy — which polls show is not only the main issue for Republicans this year, but also a concern of many independent and Democratic voters.

Early in his presidency, Biden put Harris in charge of working with Central American leaders to address root causes of immigration from their countries into the U.S. She wasn’t in charge of the border itself, or U.S. immigration policy, but Republicans don’t plan on voters making that distinction as the election heats up.

“She is a failed vice president — an individual who, anything that she’s been given responsibility for, has floundered,” Simmons said. “You look at the southern border, it’s in worse shape than when she was put in as, quote-unquote, the ‘czar’ of the border.”

Clayton dismissed GOP criticism of Harris and Biden’s record on immigration, accusing Republicans in Congress of cynically blocking immigration reforms Biden had proposed. She said the GOP would prefer immigration policy to remain broken so they can use it as a political issue.

But while Democrats feel better about Harris’s chances to energize younger voters, there’s still the question of how — or whether — Democrats can reach the rural Black voters who helped elevate Obama but have had below-average turnout rates otherwise. Clayton acknowledged in the interview that Democrats have not done enough to reach out to those communities. A 26-year-old from rural Person County, Clayton took over the state Democratic Party last year and said the party is putting a new focus on rural outreach. Of the 20 majority-minority counties in North Carolina, she said, 18 are rural.

“We don’t have people that are messengers in these communities, that feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves right now,” Clayton said. “… And so a lot of those Democrats, they felt like they were siloed off. They felt like they were not being reached out to and that their voices weren’t being heard.”

Clayton added that she’s told Harris’s staff that she needs to get out in rural North Carolina herself, shaking hands and showing people they haven’t been forgotten. But Republicans think they have a shot at reaching many of those rural voters, too — even those who aren’t white.

The Republican National Committee this past week kicked off with the Pledge of Allegiance delivered by a rural North Carolinian, state Rep. Jarrod Lowery, who’s a member of the Lumbee Tribe. And the first-ever Black nominee for governor in North Carolina didn’t come from the Democratic Party but rather from the GOP, this year, in Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

Nearly 90% of Republican voters in North Carolina are white, and comparable percentages of Black voters support Democrats.

But while Clayton and the Democrats try to regain lost ground in rural areas, Simmons said the GOP is trying to increase its appeal “not just to our average voters, but to every voter — making sure that our Black and Hispanic communities, or Asian communities, understand that there is a strong framework and a foundation here at the Republican Party that will benefit them.”