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Christie Brown has spent all of her 54 years in a small town, watching it slowly die. Its textile and furniture factories shut, younger generations fled. Inside her estate agency, Chatham Homes Realty, Brown has curated a wall of old photographs that testify to better times: bustling high street department stores, the packed parking lot of a furniture plant, smartly dressed people clamouring to enter a store the first day it got air conditioning.
But these days, Siler City, Brown’s home town of 7,700 people, smack in the middle of North Carolina, is a husk with a poverty rate twice the national average. At lunchtime on a recent sunny day, the high street of brick buildings and vacant lots had a strange stillness to it that called to mind the likes of Redcar and Middlesbrough in England — company towns where the companies have long since disappeared or faded.
Siler City is in many ways a microcosm of the issues at play in the southeastern US state as the country prepares for the presidential election on November 5. “Everyone I went to high school with, they left, because there was nothing,” Brown said. “Sadly, I told my daughters to go somewhere where there was something for them.”
• US election polls and predictions
With just two weeks to go, all but seven of America’s 50 states are spoken for: they are either squarely behind Kamala Harris or have been all but secured by Donald Trump. How people feel about their prospects in places such as Siler City, and whether Trump or Harris will do more to revive them, will have dramatic implications nationally.
North Carolina is one of the seven “swing states”. These are defined as those where the 2020 vote difference was 3 per cent or less, and are thus seen as “in play” this year. Because of America’s unique “electoral college” system, whoever wins in this handful of places will win the White House.
That is because, with the electoral college, each state is given “votes” equal to the sum of the congressmen and senators that represent their state in Washington DC. California, America’s largest state, has 52 congressmen and two senators, so wields 54 electoral college votes. Alaska, on the other hand, has two senators and one congressman. The total pool is 538 and, to win, either Trump or Harris must earn a simple majority of 270. And each state is winner-takes-all.
Trump won North Carolina, for example, by the slimmest of margins in 2020 — just 1.3 per cent, or 74,483 votes — but he received all 15 of the state’s electoral college votes. This dynamic means that in 2020 — when Joe Biden won by a margin of seven million votes nationally — had just 50,000 people across those seven states switched their votes, Trump would have been victorious despite a resounding defeat in the popular vote. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democrat strategist, said: “This is very much a very small number of people who will be deciding everything for everybody.”
• What will happen if Trump wins?
One of those people is Brown, who politely declined to say which way she was leaning. “In my business, there are two things you never talk about: politics and religion.”
This article is the first of a four-part tour through America’s swing states, which will lay bare the forces at play in the pockets where the 2024 election will be won or lost. Each Sunday we will bring you a dispatch from a different location, with the last being published on November 3 — two days before the election.
The first stop: North Carolina, one of America’s original 13 colonies and, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, “too close to call”.
Here, the biggest issue is the economy, as is the case nationally: about 52 per cent of voters say it is their biggest concern, a level not seen since 2008 when the Great Recession raged. This time, however, the main fears are not about recession but inflation — prices have surged by nearly 20 per cent since Biden took office — and jobs. Harris’s campaign has said she will be “laser focused” on the economy in these final days of her vice-presidency. It is her Achilles heel.
US unemployment has dipped to near-record lows — 4.1 per cent — and interest rates have begun to fall. But the problem is that wages have not kept up with prices. Groceries, petrol and housing costs remain stubbornly high, and voters blame Harris and Biden. The upshot is that Trump has a large lead — nine points, according to one recent poll — over Harris on who voters think is best placed to right the economic ship.
• What will happen if Harris wins?
Which makes North Carolina an interesting case study. “We’re about to bust wide open,” Brown said with a twinkle in her eye. “Siler City is about to be discovered.” Just ten miles away in the town of Liberty, North Carolina, Toyota is building a $14 billion (£11 billion) electric vehicle battery factory. The seven million sq ft plant — about the size of 100 football pitches — will be the Japanese auto giant’s largest plant in America. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Siler City, semiconductor developer Wolfspeed is nearing completion of a $5 billion mega-factory for chip materials favoured by artificial intelligence companies and electric vehicle makers.
The plants will create 7,000 badly needed jobs into the region. They were attracted partly by Biden’s signature piece of legislation: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Passed in 2022, it pledged to offer at least $370 billion in tax cuts and subsidies for green technologies, making it the largest such incentive scheme outside China.
Bridget Johnson, the head of marketing at Wolfspeed, said that the company expects to receive up to $1 billion in tax cuts under the Inflation Reduction Act. Toyota had already been working on the Liberty plant, but dramatically expanded it after the IRA became law. It is expected to employ 5,000 people when it opens next year.
For Democrats, North Carolina is a shining example of their policies in action. The question is whether the promise of future jobs will sway voters feeling squeezed today. Art Pope, an influential Republican power broker in the state and owner of a chain of 400 discount stores, said Harris is trying to take credit for decisions that would have happened anyway.
“If you make a big enough bribe, a big enough dose of corporate welfare, then sure, every business that has already made its decision based on location, quality of life, quality of the business environment, will take every dime of incentives they can get,” he said. “But incentives don’t make a difference for most companies.”
Trump has pledged to “rescind” any unspent cash under the IRA, to in effect stop Biden’s green manufacturing revolution in its tracks. Instead, he has trumpeted a tax cut for the wealthy, and a 60 per cent tariff on goods from China that he says will protect American jobs.
Justin Parmenter, a 51-year-old father of two and an English teacher in the North Carolina city of Charlotte, said: “I’d agree that Harris needs to establish [an economic] track record, but the track record Trump already has shows me that he would make my life worse economically and not better. He is a failed businessman in every sense of the word, and I believe his tariff idea would drastically increase the cost of living for everyday Americans.”
• Latest swing state polls
The shifting demographic sands in North Carolina are one reason why the state is up for grabs, and why both Trump and Harris have blanketed the airwaves with ads. Since 2020, the population has surged by 396,000 people to 10.8 million, making it one of America’s fastest-growing states. Many of those newcomers are young and university educated, a cohort that tends to vote Democrat. Indeed, the state’s numerous universities, thriving Research Triangle Park tech corridor, low taxes and flagship developments — such as those from Toyota and Wolfspeed — have created a virtuous cycle.
There has also been a surge in immigrants, both legal and illegal. In Siler City, Hispanics now account for 52 per cent of the population, and 30 per cent of its residents are foreign-born. Brown said: “When I was in high school, there were no Latinos. Zero.” Trump’s promise of a “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants could gut the town.
There are also a few wild cards that could sway the outcome. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, saw his private messages on a porn site publicised last month — ones in which he called himself a “Black Nazi” and called for the return of slavery. Trump had previously endorsed Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids”, but thus far the scandal has not dented the former president’s appeal.
Another unknown is the fallout from Hurricane Helene, which obliterated towns and washed away polling stations in the mountainous western region of North Carolina when it struck in late September. Of the 25 hardest-hit counties, 22 were deeply Republican. The disaster killed more than 200 people in southeast America — more than half of them in North Carolina — displaced thousands and has thrown a large swathe of the state into chaos, raising concerns that voter turnout could also be affected.
Inside the state house in North Carolina’s capital city of Raleigh, Jay Chaudhuri, leader of the Democrat minority, said: “The stakes are very high.” The state is on a roll, he argued, because Democrat governor Roy Cooper has used his veto to quell legislation that might otherwise drive business out of North Carolina. Roll back the clock to 2016 and the state made global news when it passed House Bill 2, also known as the “Bathroom Bill”, which required people to use the bathrooms that matched the sex on their birth certificate.
The bill was lambasted as anti-transgender and became a cause célèbre for gay rights activists. Companies such as PayPal pulled out of the state. Musicians cancelled concerts. The controversy led to an estimated $4 billion in losses for the state, and precipitated the downfall of then governor Pat McCrory, a Republican.
• Electoral college map 2024
A win for Trump, and certainly Mark Robinson (who appears, though, to have little chance of success after the recent revelations), would embolden lawmakers to pass other “culture war” type bills that could knee-cap the North Carolina revival. Chaudhuri said: “If we’ve learnt anything as a state over the last eight years, it’s that nobody wants to go back to what we experienced with House Bill 2.”
Through their control of the North Carolina state assembly, however, Republicans have also managed to put in place an array of mechanisms to make it harder to vote, including the nation’s most stringent voter ID laws and a new “poll watcher” system that allows groups of partisan observers to congregate at polling stations.
Trump has already predicted that the Democrats will “cheat” on election day. The state supreme court, having swung from Democrat to Republican control since the last election, might be more amenable to legal challenges that could follow. Chaudhuri said: “My concern is perhaps less up until election day than it is from election day until January 6 [the date of the Capitol riots in 2021].”
Back in Siler City, Brown is banking on the economic recovery for which she has been waiting for more than a quarter of a century. “I’ve been in real estate here since 1998, just holding on,” she said. “Some things you just don’t give up on. I love my small town.”
This article was first published Sunday October 12 and is updated regularly