North Carolina
‘You win by going across the entire state’: Trump and Harris vie for North Carolina
Landon Simonini found himself standing in the middle of a Charlotte highway lane at 2.30 in the afternoon, stuck in an artificial traffic jam while drivers waited for Kamala Harris’s plane to land and the motorcade to clear for the rally later that day.
He was out of his car, because why not? He wasn’t going anywhere soon. His red Make America great again cap stood out among others cursing the traffic gods.
Simonini, born and bred in Charlotte, builds houses. His livelihood depends to some degree on Charlotte’s tremendous growth. But all growth isn’t great, he said.
“This is a traditionally southern state,” Simonini said. “Over 100 people move to Charlotte a day. That is changing the election map. I am born and raised in Charlotte, for 33 years. I have lived here my entire life. I went to school at UNC Charlotte. This is my city. It is a conservative city and I want to keep it that way.”
But in America’s nail-biting 2024 presidential election, North Carolina is now in play. It rejoins a select list of crucial swing states whose voters will decide if Harris becomes America’s first woman of color to win the White House or if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office from which he wreaked political chaos for four years.
Up until about two months ago, the odds didn’t look like this.
Though the margins in North Carolina have been close for decades in presidential races, Obama in 2008 was the last Democrat since 1976 to win the state, eking out a win by three-tenths of a percent. Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to turn North Carolina into an also-ran contest. Every poll through June had Trump beating the president by at least two points, with an average around six.
Party affiliation can only tell so much in a state with a storied history of split-ticket voting. Almost four in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million registered voters choose not to affiliate with a political party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new registered voters in North Carolina while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters.
Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes in 2020, a margin of about 1.3%, his closest winning state, before losing the election. Biden won the four states with closer margins – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’s ascent scrambled the math. North Carolina’s secretary of state, Elaine Marshall, described the reaction as euphoric.
“It’s such a dramatic contrast from that venom, that poison, that hatred that’s coming from Republican events,” she said. “That contrasts so strongly with the hope and the expectations of the future from Democratic party events.”
The Trump campaign reportedly abandoned its efforts to mount a serious contest in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia recently. That leaves seven states in the political battleground – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and now North Carolina.
Counting electors aside from the remaining non-battleground states, Harris starts with 226 and Trump with 219. North Carolina can deliver 16 electoral votes to the victor. A candidate must have 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Only Pennsylvania has more electors among the remaining battleground states.
A re-energized Democratic electorate has been visible in polling data, which now shows the state as tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolinians who are Black; increased African American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.
But the enthusiasm is far more widespread, and was visible this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies this week, one in Charlotte and another a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice-president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth just this year.
If Harris wins North Carolina and holds in Michigan and Wisconsin, she need only win one of the four other swing states to clinch the presidency. But if Trump wins North Carolina, he can win the presidency with Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin even while losing elector-rich Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Melissa Benton waited on one foot for traffic to clear Tuesday night outside the Greensboro coliseum. Her right knee rested on a scooter, keeping her broken ankle off the ground. She came up from Charlotte for the event, she said.
Benton is an Atlanta-area transplant. She left Georgia out of frustration with how her community had changed with growth. The irony is not lost on her.
Locals complain about the rising cost of living, and skyrocketing housing costs are first on the list. Even people who have weathered the slow-motion collapse of the furniture industry over the last 30 years are being saddled with property tax increases as their homes rise in value.
“Every time I meet a native Charlottean, I’m always like, ‘Listen, I’ve been where you are right now,” Benton said. “I swear I’ll be a great citizen, because I understand what it’s like for new people to come in.” She has a keen eye on municipal problems, services and infrastructure. “But it’s also keeping Charlotte Charlotte, and we’ve lost sight of that in some big cities.”
Affordable housing is a crisis in Charlotte, much like it is in Atlanta and Greensboro and most large cities in the US. But in North Carolina, it’s not just an urban problem. Lenoir – pronounced “len-OR” – up at the edge of the Brushy mountain range of the Appalachians, is in one of 73 rural counties in the state, and it has a problem with market rate housing too. About a third of North Carolina’s voters live in rural counties.
The Democratic party has a field office in Lenoir. The lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, held a campaign event there on Wednesday for his gubernatorial run. Marshall, the secretary of state, held a discussion there last week. No part of the state can escape battleground politics today.
Democrats have long expected a brutal fight in North Carolina, and have been investing time, money and personnel into the state for the last year.
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“The Democratic party is certainly trying to reach young people,” Marshall said. It’s also trying hard to connect with young women who may have abortion politics on their mind. “They’ve got Sunday school, and they’ve got work, getting the kids fed and kind of stuff. So suburban mom, working professional women, you know.”
Harris’s visit to North Carolina for her first rallies since the debate is no accident. North Carolina is that important. Trump has planned a rally in Wilmington on North Carolina’s coast next week. JD Vance, his running mate, will be in Raleigh next week as well. The Republican campaign has been sending surrogates to local events regularly. Two weeks from now, former housing secretary Ben Carson will speak at the Salt and Light conference of the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition.
The Democratic party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staff, according to the campaign. The choices of placement for some of the offices, such as rural Wilson county in the state’s “Black belt” and Lenoir in western mountain country, speak to movement away from a focus on high-density urban territory that’s friendly to Democrats.
Democrats are also using their significant financial advantages in fundraising to swaddle broadcast and social media in a blanket of Harris advertising. Organizers say they’ve been on the air with ads for a year. Ad tracking firm AdImpact notes that Democrats have reserved about $50m in ad buys through the end of the cycle, with particular attention paid to Black and Spanish-language media outlets. Trump only began advertising in earnest in August.
But Republican campaign leaders view much of that effort as artificial.
“We feel like, from our standpoint, that the race is a toss-up, but we feel like we still have an advantage,” said Matt Mercer, director of communications for the North Carolina GOP. “One of the big reasons is our leadership. You know, we didn’t abandon a ground game at any level in 2020. What you’re seeing from Democrats is an effort to catch up.”
The Republican campaign is decentralized, Mercer said, accommodating far-flung efforts in a state that’s 560 miles wide from Manteo in the east to Murphy in the west. “You win statewide by going across the entire state, and that means going west of I-77 and east of I-95.”
“For every person that’s moving to Charlotte or Raleigh, you’ve also got retired couples moving to the coast, or you’ve got military deciding to stay in the state,” Mercer said. “You know, I think Democrats kind of fall into this trap where they think growth is all going to benefit them, and they’re just missing it.”
The GOP dominates North Carolina’s legislative branch, which has enough Republicans to override a gubernatorial veto. But North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat and the state has elected a Democratic governor for most of the last 30 years, even as it has delivered wins to Republican presidents.
Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has maintained a consistent lead over Robinson throughout the year. Robinson is an unusually controversial candidate even by standards set in the Trump era, with a litany of offensive and antisemitic attacks made on social media or in public statements.
Robinson has tried to keep a low profile over the last few months, even as Stein has used his financial edge to batter Robinson with ads drawing primarily on the lieutenant governor’s own words. In recent weeks, Robinson has taken to the campaign trail, meeting with small groups in small towns far away from urban centers, haranguing the media and calling Stein’s ads deceptive. “Josh Stein is a liar,” he said, demanding that a news reporter convey that message to his opponent, along with a demand for a debate.
Stein has, so far, declined.
James Adamakis watched a Robinson stemwinder from a seat at Countryside BBQ in the small town of Marion, North Carolina, on Tuesday. It’s a popular stop for politicians in North Carolina’s rural mountains. A picture of Barack Obama’s visit in 2011 hangs proudly on the wall next to the cash register.
Adamakis works in juvenile justice. The military veteran supports Republicans because they’re tougher on crime he said. But he acknowledges that even people who share his political values may vote in peculiar ways in North Carolina.
He described the conversion of one of his friends into a Republican. “It was the economics, where he just kept seeing the inflation and buying groceries and everything,” Adamakis said. “He was like, why is the media and Biden saying that it’s good when it’s not? I think that the economy cuts across lines.
“Everybody you meet in western North Carolina still may vote Democrat, but they still don’t like that.”
But political diversity is about more than race in North Carolina. The economy of a place like Research Triangle Park near Durham is fundamentally different from the banking sector in Charlotte, or the tourism of the southern coast, or mountain towns struggling to reinvent themselves.
“It might be easier in my job if there were just one [swing voter], but there’s not,” Mercer said. And I think that dynamism is what makes the state so interesting and so hard to win, and why you truly need to understand the entire state.”
North Carolina
Eric Church delivers ‘greatest commencement speech ever’ in viral address to University of North Carolina graduates
Country music star Eric Church earned praise for delivering the “greatest” commencement speech with his now-viral address to University of North Carolina graduates — after working on the piece for nearly a year.
Church – armed with a Tar Heel-emblazoned guitar – invoked family and faith as he dedicated his oration by giving a lesson on the instrument, explaining what each of the “six strings” means at Kenan Memorial Stadium in Chapel Hill on May 9.
“Six strings. When all six are in tune, the chords they make can stop a conversation cold, carry a broken person through the worst night of their life, or make a room full of strangers feel for three minutes like they’ve known each other forever,” Church told the crowd. “And if even one is off, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually, not politely, the moment you strike it, you know.”
The 49-year-old Grammy-nominated singer started with the “low E” string of the guitar, the thickest, lowest note on the instrument.
“Your faith is the low E of your life. The thing that sits at the very bottom of you,” he said. “The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons do not come undone in extraordinary ones.”
“The world will try to untune this string. Through busyness, through slow accumulation of a full schedule, a full inbox, a full life. Listen to me. Tend to your faith. Not just when you’re broken, but when you’re whole,” he said.
Church turned to the “A” string, comparing it to family and pointing the Class of 2026 to the stands and their loved ones, who “loved you longer than you’ve been easy to love.”
“And the A string is where the music starts to get warm. It gives a chord its body, its richness. It’s the string that makes you feel like you’re not alone in a room,”
The North Carolina native cautioned attendees not to let their soon-to-be-busy schedules get in the way of their families.
“Call your people. Not when there’s news. Not when there’s nothing. Show up when it costs you something. Let them see you when things are hard. The A string is not a holiday string. It’s an everyday string. Protect it,” he said.
Church, a lifelong Tar Heels fan who graduated from Appalachian State, referred to the “D” string as the “heart of the chord,” likening it to a soul mate.
“To rock a full chord in a D string is what you feel in the center of your chest. That is not an accident,” he said. “That is exactly what the right spouse and partner will do for your life. The person you choose to share your life with is the most important decision you will ever make outside of your faith.
“The right partner is the string that makes the whole chord ring fuller and warmer and truer than anything you could ever play alone. Choose them wisely, and then love them fiercely,” he added.
Church earned a good chuckle from the crowd when he introduced the fourth string, “the G-string.”
The risque-sounding note often drifts faster than its counterparts because “ambition and resilience” pull at it in different directions, Church revealed.
“When you fail, and you will fail, Hemingway wrote it plainly right in his sternum. ‘The world breaks everyone. Afterward, the best of us are stronger at the broken places.’ Get back up. Tune the string, keep playing,” Church said.
Church urged the graduates to take note of the “B” string and its standing for community.
“Your generation faces the temptation no generation before has ever faced. The temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one. To be globally visible and locally invisible. To have thousands of followers and no one actually knows where you live. Resist this,” he said.
“Plant yourself somewhere. Put down roots with the full intention of growing there. Learn the actual names, not usernames, of the people around you. Volunteer. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs, even if the internet will never see it, Church advised.
The final string, the “high E,” the thinnest on the guitar, carries the melody against all the pressure.
“Someone’s comment, someone’s criticism, someone’s cold opinion is going to try to convince you to retune yourself to match what they think you should sound like. Do not let them touch your string,” he said.
Church’s speech, which he shared on YouTube, garnered highly positive feedback with many calling it the “best” and “greatest” graduation addresses in history.
“This is one of the best commencement speeches I’ve ever heard. Bravo, Mr. Church!!” one comment read.
“Wow, an absolutely incredible speech, so profound . Amazing job Mr. Church. God Bless You,” another commenter wrote.
“Might be the greatest commencement speech ever. ‘Play your six strings!’” said a third.
Church revealed that he had been working on the speech for nine months and only came up with the guitar delivery after a “fit of frustration.”
“I just couldn’t figure out how to do it and one night I grabbed a guitar to kinda soothe my soul and I just strummed the “G” chord,” he told CNN. “And it dawned on me, who am I kidding, I should do the speech just like this.”
Church said he was determined to build out the six pillars to replicate the strings and to deliver a “foundational message” that had been around for many generations.
The back story of how the 249-year-old sketch was discovered could be as interesting as the piece itself.
The rectangular drawing of a revolutionary war
brigade out of North Carolina was created in Pennsylvania.
Looking at it now, the sketch looks significant
sitting behind museum glass. But just three years ago, it was considered a
novel antique store find, hanging on a collector’s wall.
Historian Matthew Skic said he was in collector, Judith Hernstadt’s New York home when she happened to show him a sketch she’d picked up at an antique store in the 1970s.
“I look on the wall, she points it out, and my jaw is on the floor with what I was seeing, and this small sketch on paper. The ink and the paper struck me as this looks like it’s from the 18th century, from the 1700s. I was looking at the scene, seeing soldiers, a wagon, horses, and it looked like a military scene, and an army on the move,” Skic said.
Skic oversees collections at the Museum of the
American Revolution and immediately noticed the figure in a fringed hunting
shirt, commonly worn by soldiers in George Washington’s Army. He got permission to remove the framed sketch from the wall and saw a faint inscription.
“It said, ‘An exact representation of a wagon belonging to
the North Carolina brigade of Continental troops, which passed through Phila,’ and then the mat had cut off the rest of the inscription,” he recalled.
What he had discovered was one of only a dozen known eye-witness accounts of George Washington’s Army. An eye-witness account is considered something captured in the moment, not commissioned or created after an event.
“We didn’t have a camera. There’s no record of what, what they looked like, action scenes,” said Ansley Herring Wegner, who runs the state’s historical
research and publications.
She spoke to the rarity of finding an eye-witness account of Washington’s troops.
“Well, George Washington had just recently said, ‘Do not
allow camp followers on the carts, because it really slows everything down. It gums up the works.’ Well, North Carolina, ‘You can’t tell us what to do,’ so they’re there on the cart, and there’s wounded soldiers on the back,” Herring Wegner said.
Immediately after the discovery, Skic went to work. He found headlines from August 1777 when
the brigade marched through Philadelphia and traced the route they took. Then, he
researched skilled artists in town at the time and landed on Pierre Eugene du
Simitiere.
“So I studied his handwriting among his papers at the
Library Company in Philadelphia, and [found it] matches his handwriting,” he said.
Whether many Americans know it or not, we are familiar with du Simitiere’s work. It was his idea in an application to design the U.S. Seal that gave us our national motto.
“His design was ultimately rejected, but one of the
elements of his design for that seal, which he submitted in 1776 was the motto, e pluribus unum, which we still use today. That’s the motto of the United
States; Out of many, one.
The sketch was on display at the Capitol for
one day. However, the conditions were not favorable for a long-term stay. Visitors can see it when it goes to the North Carolina Museum of Art from
May 20 to Aug. 1.
The original owner, Judith Hernstadt, has donated the sketch to the Museum of the American Revolution. The presentation of the sketch at the Capitol building is part of North Carolina’s celebration of America’s 250th. Learn more about the sketch at the state’s website for the country’s milestone.
North Carolina
North Carolina couple accused of causing vulture invasion sued by furious town: ‘Not good neighbors’
A North Carolina couple accused of luring hordes of vultures to their home and unleashing chaos on neighbors for years is being hauled to court by fed-up town officials desperate to end the feathered frenzy.
The Town of Hillsborough slapped residents Kenneth and Linda Ostrand with a civil petition, seeking a court order to shut down their relentless bird-feeding habit, blamed for allegedly drawing dozens of winged scavengers to their home and terrorizing their small town for the past two years.
“They’re a little spooky to be frank,” concerned neighbor Holden Richards told WTVD.
“Everybody thinks they’re ugly and stuff but they’re not good neighbors. They have sharp talons, so they’re not great animals to have perching on your house. I watched them pick tiles off my neighbor’s roof and I found tiles from my roof in my front yard, so I have a feeling that’s exactly where they came from.”
The bird-brained couple is accused of leaving out food scraps for vultures, allegedly reeling in the feathered predators that have swarmed and roosted near their house, leaving foul-smelling droppings on neighbors’ homes and vehicles and causing widespread property damage deemed a risk to public safety.
The complaint, filed in March, also claims the twisted pair named the birds of prey – with eerie photos submitted to the court showing dozens of vultures circling their Queens Street home, the outlet reported.
“I’m pretty sure that every one of my neighbors has probably called,” Richards said, pointing to a flood of complaints made to town officials since May 2024.
The Ostrands reportedly filed a motion to dismiss the town’s case last month, denying the accusations.
Linda Ostrand, a longtime wildlife rescuer, told WTVD she is being unfairly targeted by her community and claimed the circling creatures were already an issue before she moved into the neighborhood.
“It’s sort of, it’s ridiculous, is what it is,” Linda said, noting the town changed an ordinance after the initial wave of complaints to ban wildlife feeding beyond standard feeders.
“If people didn’t have vultures around here you would hear them screaming bloody murder about the town not cleaning up the animals that have been hit by cars, because that’s what they do, they are nature’s garbage disposal,” she continued.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, tell the vultures that this is a no-feed zone. I just don’t know.”
No court date has reportedly been scheduled for the couple’s fight with the town.
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