President Joe Biden opens 10 field offices in North Carolina, none in a rural county

As reported by Axios, President Joe Biden has opened ten field offices in North Carolina, a crucial battleground state that could decide the 2024 Presidential election. The Biden campaign has focused its efforts on urban and suburban voters, believing that they represent a constituency that could give the incumbent President the state and its 16 electoral votes. Biden only lost North Carolina by 1.34% (or 74,483) votes, and it was the only state that Donald Trump won while also failing to win over 50% of the vote. However, the decision to focus solely on urban and suburban voters represents the Democratic Party's continued neglect of rural communities and abandoning the coalition that built the North Carolina Democratic Party in the post-Civil Rights era.

The late 20th-century North Carolina Democratic Party had deep roots in rural North Carolina, a time during which the Democrats led the way in progressive reforms that allowed North Carolina to distinguish itself as the most progressive Southern state.

Scotland County's Terry Sanford led North Carolina through the Civil Rights Era and refused to join his fellow Southern governors in trying to block racial progress. He raised education funding, championed the creation of what would later become the North Carolina Community College system, and endowed anti-poverty programs.

A decade later, Wilson County's Jim Hunt built upon this progress by continuing to champion education and build programs that promoted student success. Hunt narrowly lost his attempt to dethrone Jesse Helms in the 1984 Senate race and returned to the governor's mansion in the 1990s to continue his work.

North Carolina Democrats also sent Sanford to the United States Senate in the 80s, after his tenure as President of Duke University concluded. Sanford lost re-election in 1992, but Moore County's John Edwards filled his seat six years later.

The consistent theme of the North Carolina Democrats in the latter half of the 20th century was the championing of policies that benefited working-class North Carolinians, which included increases to education funding, infrastructure funding for rural corners of the state, and the continuation of racial progress. Were they perfect? Of course not. But rural voters knew they could trust the Democratic Party to have their back.

Over the last decade, however, Democrats have begun to lose their rural strongholds in North Carolina and seem to be putting little effort into getting them back.

My first direct exposure to politics in 2008 came as a volunteer at then-Senator Barack Obama's campaign office in Lumberton, North Carolina. At the time, my native Robeson County, North Carolina, was staunchly blue. In fact, Richard Nixon in 1972 was the only Republican to ever win there (at least since the end of Reconstruction). In the 2008 Democratic primary, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both had field offices in the county. Obama even carried it by almost 17.5% in 2012. In the 2010s, however, Robeson County politics took a hard turn to the right. We elected Republicans to the county commission and state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. Donald Trump won the county in 2016 and 2020. This shift also happened on the state level, Pat McCrory and Dan Forest won Robeson County during their gubernatorial runs.

In 2020, Trump added to his support in Robeson County, likely buoyed by his decision to visit Lumberton in the waning days of the campaign. In fact, Trump gained more support in Robeson County, both in terms of percentage and raw numbers, than he did anywhere else in the state. 

Robeson is not an outlier in rural North Carolina. Six rural counties flipped to Trump in 2016 and remained in his column in 2020: Robeson, Bladen, Richmond, Gates, Granville, and Martin. The loss of Robeson, Bladen, and Richmond represents the loss of perhaps the poorest region of North Carolina. Along with Scotland County, which flipped to Trump in 2020, these counties represent a contiguous strip close to the South Carolina border in the eastern half of the state. All are persistent poverty counties, meaning they've had high poverty rates for at least three decades. These are the people to whom we should be listening.

North Carolina's urban and suburban areas are rapidly growing, so from a mathematical perspective, it seems logical to focus on them. However, President Biden's campaign must not leave rural North Carolinians behind. Rural North Carolina has many long-time activists, who helped power the Democratic coalition in the state for decades. As anyone who grew up in North Carolina in the latter half of the 20th century should know, many of our most progressive leaders came from the state's rural corners. The effectiveness of these activists is enhanced when they have institutional support. If you actually want to enact policies that better the lives of the most impoverished, you must create the infrastructure necessary for them to offer their input. 

It also makes mathematical sense to have a presence in rural communities. In 2008, Barack Obama won North Carolina by just 14,177 votes, and Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 by just 11,779. 

There are reasons to be optimistic. The 2023 election of Person County's Anderson Clayton represents the infusion of rural ideas to the state party's leadership. Soon after her election, she pledged to remedy the problem that saw Democrats leave 44 state legislative seats uncontested. We'll see how that manifests into campaign strategy for the upcoming election cycle. 

We cannot afford to let the Republican Party have a monopoly on communities like where I grew up.