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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Republican Sen. Liddy Dole may be a goner, and John McCain is in trouble in a state the GOP hasn't lost since 1976. What happened?
By Mike Madden
Read more: John McCain, Politics, Bob Dole, News, North Carolina, Economy, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Mike Madden
Reuters/Chris Keane
Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., shakes hands before the start of the Bank of America 500 NASCAR race at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., Oct. 11, 2008.
Oct. 13, 2008 | CONCORD, N.C. -- Elizabeth Dole stood on the track at Lowe's Motor Speedway Saturday night, a few minutes before NASCAR's Bank of America 500 got started, and looked up at the stage. Up where Dole had just given a quick welcoming speech to the racetrack crowd of 115,000 (many of them her constituents in North Carolina), Jessica Simpson was getting ready to sing the national anthem. And evidently, Dole had no idea who she was. "The young lady who is singing was over [there] practicing a minute ago," Dole said, an expression of pity on her face. "God bless her heart."
Simpson probably did need the practice -- as ESPN's cameras and the crowd watched, she sang about broad stripes and bright stars lasting through "the perilous flight" -- but it's Dole who may need the pity. Polls show she's likely to lose her Senate seat to Democrat Kay Hagan, after doing little during a single six-year term to distinguish herself. (Even the two years she spent as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee ended badly -- she presided over the Democratic takeover in 2006.) Though many observers thought Hagan's campaign was stalled over the summer, national Democrats didn't give up: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has been hammering Dole with folksy, catchy ads featuring cranky old white guys complaining about her ("What's happened to the Liddy Dole I knew?" is the tag line) that stand out from the usual political fare. The economic meltdown has been cataclysmic for Republicans everywhere, and now it seems to have helped put Hagan in a position to win.
In any other election year, what's happening in North Carolina would be just another case of a first-term senator paying a little less attention to winning a second term than she probably should have, and discovering voters had noticed. (Dole, who lives in Washington's Watergate apartment complex with her husband, Bob, recently found herself on the defensive over newspaper reports that she spent only 13 days in the state in 2006; aides say she made unspecified other trips when she didn't do any official business, but that's not much of a comeback.) But even if Dole hasn't wrecked her chances all by herself, she may get run over by Barack Obama's campaign. No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but -- shockingly -- the state has become a battleground in this election. John McCain's strategists have already concluded Dole is a lost cause, and now they're trying to keep North Carolina's 15 electoral votes from going to Obama.
"The McCain campaign is playing a little catch-up in North Carolina now," said Paul Shumaker, the chief consultant for Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who's probably lucky his seat isn't up till 2010. As a sign of how scary the national map now looks for McCain, he is actually going to have to show up in North Carolina -- he will be in Wilmington on Monday, in a corner of the state where Republicans need to rack up big margins to offset Democratic strength in Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Research Triangle." (The suburbs and exurbs between Charlotte and the Triangle are where the race may well be determined.) Sarah Palin was in North Carolina last week, and Cindy McCain was in the state Saturday. Like Dole, she also swung by the track Saturday night -- she was the grand marshal of the race, and toured the pits and garage areas with former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs before greeting the crowd. If she was worried, she didn't show it; an amateur drift racer who campaigns at a NASCAR race every few weeks, she might have come to the speedway Saturday even if McCain didn't need the help here. "He has more energy than anyone," she told Gibbs about her husband, bucking up one of his campaign's more prominent supporters.
Energy may not be enough for him. Like everywhere else this year, part of what has Democrats excited is the potential for a surge of new voters. Since January, Democrats added 245,305 new registrations, while Republicans added 46,748. A third of the new voters are black, according to state statistics. The state has seen an influx of newcomers over the last decade, drawn -- until recently -- by the banking industry in Charlotte and the high-tech jobs in the Triangle. Between 2004 and 2006 alone, the percentage of residents who were born outside the state increased from 33 percent to 36 percent, a pretty quick shift in a state that may soon be changing demographically as rapidly as Virginia has.
Trying to take advantage of that dynamic, Obama has 45 field offices open, everywhere from Charlotte, the state's biggest city, to Cullowhee, with fewer than 4,000 residents. He's spending more than $1 million on TV ads a week, while McCain just ratcheted up his buy in the last few days; now both campaigns are spending enough to dot the NFL broadcasts on Sunday with political commercials. Obama's state headquarters, in an upscale office building on the outskirts of Raleigh, just expanded to take over a second suite down the hall. On top of that, Obama almost has more volunteers than his aides here know what to do with. "Every precinct in this state will be worked by people from that precinct," Obama's North Carolina director, Marc Farinella, said.
By simply forcing McCain to work for North Carolina -- and spend money here -- Obama has already done more than some people in the state expected when the campaign first announced it would make North Carolina a priority. But it's quite possible Obama will manage much more than that. One recent poll by a Democratic firm showed Obama winning the 828 area code, which covers the western part of the state. That one was probably a bit of an outlier, though. "If he does that in western North Carolina, this might be a slam-dunk," Rep. Mel Watt, a Democrat who represents Greensboro, said with a laugh.
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