Thread: Rapidly Changing North Carolina Becoming A Key Swing State

JULY 5 2016, 4:42 PM ET

Rapidly Changing North Carolina Becoming A Key Swing State

by DANTE CHINNI

As the 2016 presidential campaign takes shape for the fall, North Carolina is once again emerging as an important battleground state, but a close examination of the numbers suggests growing advantages there for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Both Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump traveled to the Tar Heel State on Tuesday because they can do the math. In short, any plausible path to the White House for Trump involves winning all the states, like this one, that Republican Mitt Romney won in 2012.

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Much has been made of Trump's hopes of pursuing a Rust Belt strategy that would involve capturing Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, along with a few other states Obama carried in 2012. But none of that will matter if Trump can't hold onto North Carolina, which went Republican in 2012 but also voted for President Barack Obama in 2008.

In other words, in the last two elections North Carolina has actually been a "swing state" and the data suggest it's swinging the wrong way for the GOP in 2016.

In 2000, George W. Bush won North Carolina by some 13 percentage points. He won it by 12 points in 2004. But since then the state has become very close in presidential elections.

NBC News
What happened? North Carolina is growing rapidly. It holds 25 percent more people than it did in 2000 - that's a much faster rate of growth than the United States as a whole in that time - and in the process North Carolina has also grown more racially and ethnically diverse.

In 2000, North Carolina's population was more than 70 percent white and non-Hispanic. That figure is now 63.8 percent. At the same time the Hispanic population has almost doubled from 4.7 percent to 9.1 percent.

But perhaps just as problematic for the GOP nominee is where and how the state has grown. Its urban centers have become much more populous.

Wake and Mecklenburg counties - the homes of the cities of Raleigh and Charlotte - have seen their populations grow by 63 percent and 49 percent respectively. They now each hold more than 1 million people, by far the most of any counties in the state.

Together they hold more than 20 percent of the state's population.

And since 2000 and since then both counties have gone from voting Republican to voting very Democratic.

George W. Bush captured 53 percent of the vote from Wake and 51 percent from Mecklenburg in 2000. In 2012 Obama won 55 percent of the vote from Wake and 61 percent from Mecklenburg.

Those are enormous swings.

And, maybe most troubling for the Trump campaign, both counties have been filling up with a group of voters that seem to be an especially hard sell for the Trump campaign: college-educated voters, as we noted last week.

In North Carolina, about 28 percent of people over 25 have at least a bachelor's degree. In Mecklenburg the figure is 42 percent. In Wake, its 48 percent.

In many ways Wake (and the collegiate Research Triangle counties around it) along with Mecklenburg, look a bit like the Northern Virginia counties that sit in suburban Washington DC - educated, diverse, relatively wealthy. Those counties are the principal reason why Virginia has gone Democratic in recent presidential, gubernatorial and senate races.

None of this means that Trump can't win North Carolina. It's a true battleground/toss-up on most electoral maps right now. But the numbers here suggest he is going to have to fight hard to hold onto it in 2016.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016...-state-n604186

The biggest problem we've had over the last couple decades is the large amount of liberals migrating from the Northern states. They've been pouring into our cities to take advantage of lower taxes, job opportunities, and better weather. Of course they're not running from their liberal ideology. That, unfortunately, comes with them!

Sadly, our southern cities (not to ignore other areas of the nation) have been transformed by illegal immigration and by those people and groups that profit from their presence. They are catered to by politicians, businesses, ethnic organizations, others. We the people have been betrayed. America has been betrayed. " Fundamental Transformation" continues.

Originally Posted by MW

The biggest problem we've had over the last couple decades is the large amount of liberals migrating from the Northern states. They've been pouring into our cities to take advantage of lower taxes, job opportunities, and better weather. Of course they're not running from their liberal ideology. That, unfortunately, comes with them!

This is what happened to Colorado in the 1990s.

North Carolina became a magnet for illegals when the housing boom began. New neighborhoods were going up everywhere for transplants moving here, many from more liberal areas of the country. The illegal alien population exploded and the schools quickly experienced a major demographic shift as they were flooded with the U.S. born children of the illegals. Here, and all across the country, these anchor kids are reaching voting age and are subsequently responsible for the rising Hispanic vote . Anchor babies and liberal transplants play a major part in the leftward shift of NC, I suspect.

I spent a lot of time in NC visiting family in Hendersonville. The first Mexican restaurant popped up in the late 90's complete with a money transfer in an adjacent building. It was only a few years later that Hendersonville was swamped with illegals. It is my opinion, that it operated as a way station for illegals, just as so many others that suddenly appeared in parts of the country that had never had a large presence of Mexican illegals.

Consider this article from 2006. It appears time has proven Tancredo right.

MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
TAKE OVER U.S. CITIES

Tancredo says gangs buy businesses,

politicians, power, police departments

Published: 06/18/2006 at 9:00 PMimage:
JOSEPH FARAH

WASHINGTON – Mexican drug cartels operating in cities in the U.S. are buying up legitimate businesses to launder money and using some of the proceeds to win local mayoral and city council seats for politicians who can shape the policies and personnel decisions of their police forces, according to Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who has led the fight to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

In his new book, “In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security,” Tancredo exposes what he has learned from meetings with law enforcement authorities regarding a concerted effort by the Mexican mafia and drug cartels to extend their corruptive influence in urban areas dominated by illegal alien populations.
Tancredo says some of these small cities have become hostile and dangerous places for legitimate law enforcement officials.

“The Tijuana-based Felix drug cartel and the Juarez-based Fuentes cartel began buying legitimate business in small towns in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s,” he writes in his new book published by WND Books. “They purchased restaurants, used-car lots, auto-body shops and other small businesses. One of their purposes was to use these businesses for money-laundering operations. Once established in their community, these cartel-financed business owners ran for city council and other local offices. Over time, they were able to buy votes and influence in an effort to take over the management of the town. They wanted to create a comfort zone from which they could operate without interference from local law enforcement.”

Tancredo, the chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, now a powerful force within Congress for opposing amnesty plans for illegal aliens and for promoting tougher border security measures, points, as an example, to the L.A. County city of Bell Gardens – where corrupt elected officials under the influence of drug lords actually tried to shut down the police department.

“City officials who would not cooperate with the Mexican-born city manager were forced out of office,” he writes. “Eventually, the L.A. County attorney’s office moved in, and the city manager was prosecuted on charges of corruption. Unfortunately, Bell Gardens was only the tip of the iceberg. Other Los Angeles suburbs – including Huntington Park, Lynwood and Southgate – became targets for the cartels.”

In fact, similar efforts to undermine law and order by Mexican criminal gangs are under way, Tancredo says, in Texas, Arizona and elsewhere.

“The corruption spreading from south of the border is not confined to Southern California,” he writes. “In Cameron County, Texas, the former sheriff and several other officials were recently convicted of receiving drug-smuggling bribes. In Douglas, Ariz. – where the international border runs down the middle of the town and divides it from its sister city of Agua Prieta, Mexico – the mayor’s brother was discovered to have a tunnel from one of his rental properties going into Mexico.”

Tancredo reports he has had confidential briefings with top officials in big-city law enforcement who say there are entire cities under the virtual control of Mexican criminal street gangs and their associated businesses, in some cases, making it dangerous for county, state and national law enforcement officers to venture in and rendering any interdepartmental cooperation impossible.

This under-reported aspect of the immigration and border problem is just one of the reasons Tancredo believes the U.S., as a nation, is “in mortal danger” as the debate over solutions rages on in Washington.

In his new book, “In Mortal Danger,” Tancredo, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the border security issue in the nation’s capital, tells the whole story of the threats facing the nation, the solutions within its grasp and his own personal quest to awaken the political establishment to the seething discontentment gripping America as a result of illegal immigration.

Tancredo warns that the country is on a course to the dustbin of history. Like the great and mighty empires of the past, he writes, superpowers that once stretched from horizon to horizon, America is heading down the road to ruin.
English historian Edward Gibbon, in penning his classic “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (ironically published in the year America’s Founding Fathers declared independence from Great Britain), theorized that Rome fell because it rotted from within. It succumbed to barbarian invasions because of a loss of civic virtue, its citizens became lazy and soft, hiring barbarian mercenaries to defend the empire because they were unwilling to defend it themselves.

Tancredo says America is following in the tragic footsteps of Rome.

Living up to his reputation for candor, Tancredo explains how the economic success and historical military prowess of the United States has transformed a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles of right and wrong into an overindulgent, self-deprecating, immoral cesspool of depravity.

His recipe for turning things around?

Without strong, moral leadership, without a renewed sense of purpose, without a rededication to family and community, without shunning the race hustlers and pop-culture sham artists, without protecting borders, language and culture, the nation that once was “the land of the free and home of the brave” and the “one last best hope of mankind” will repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the past, he writes.

Tancredo, born and raised in Colorado, represents Colorado’s 6th district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to his election to Congress in 1998, Tancredo worked as a schoolteacher, was elected to the Colorado State House of Representatives in 1976, was appointed by President Reagan as the secretary of education’s regional representative in 1981, and served as president of the Independence Institute. He serves on the International Relations Committee, the Resources Committee and the Budget Committee, and is the chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. Tancredo and his wife, Jackie, reside in Littleton, Colo.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2006/06/36486/#JDAGFpY7kRas1WMA.99

Would be fun to live in a swing state but alas, my state is a one party state.