Kerry, Edwards Face Uphill Battle in Republican-Leaning North Carolina

In an unguarded moment during their presidential primary battle, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts dismissed the notion that Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina represented Democrats’ best hope for a strong showing in the South this November.

“He can’t win his own state,” Kerry told an aide.

Now, those words in February are ancient history for Kerry. Fresh from selecting Edwards as his running mate on the presumed Democratic presidential ticket, Kerry comes with him to North Carolina today to challenge President Bush’s grip on a state that has voted Republican in the last six presidential elections.

The Bush campaign acknowledged the potential political threat Friday by launching commercials on North Carolina television stations for the first time in this year’s campaign. Recent polling showed Bush with a modest lead in the state, but suggested the race could tighten with Edwards as the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

North Carolina is not without a Democratic presence. Its governor is a Democrat, six of its 13 House members are Democrats, and the party controls the state Senate and shares power in the state House. Still, the obstacles to national Democrats remain so numerous that most analysts doubt Kerry can capture the state’s 15 electoral votes, even with Edwards at his side.

Here and throughout the South, much of the trouble for Kerry starts with white males like Tracy Maurer, a 36-year-old electrician in Roxboro (population 8,900).

Maurer moved here from Pennsylvania after his previous employer closed and set up shop in China. He’s an independent -- he supported H. Ross Perot in 1996 and sat out the 2000 election -- who fears something went wrong with the invasion of Iraq. In short, he is the kind of Southern voter Democrats are looking for.

“It’s time to stop meddling in foreign affairs and start trying to take care of our own country,” Maurer said in an interview outside a Roxboro shopping center. “All the good-paying, good-benefit jobs are leaving.”

Yet Maurer also complains that politicians “are all tangled up now in this gay and lesbian marriage thing” -- alluding to the debate over same-sex marriage that could hurt Kerry and Edwards in rural America. Bottom line: He grudgingly leans toward reelecting Bush.

Sonny Ford, 27, a maintenance worker, was more definitive. “I don’t know about this Kerry guy,” he said. “He looks kind of shady to me. I reckon it’s the liberal part.”

He described himself as a voter who was raised Republican, and is suspicious of what he sees as Democratic support for people on welfare. Like Maurer, he was unmoved by Kerry’s pick of Edwards for his ticket.

With Jeff Moore, though, Kerry made a partial inroad this week. Moore, 34, a supervisor at a movie complex, voted for Bush in 2000 and had been leaning toward doing so again because he viewed Kerry as someone who talks in circles. But Moore said he is now giving the Democrats a second look.

“After he named Edwards, I’d have to actually think about it a bit more,” Moore said. He said he was attracted to Edwards because of the senator’s reputation for running “a cleaner campaign.”

Moore said his chief concerns were foreign affairs and the federal budget deficit. “The everyday person has to balance a checkbook on a monthly basis,” Moore said. “That’s something the government hasn’t had to do now for awhile.”

To be sure, it is hazardous to draw generalizations about the white male vote in the South. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was excoriated last year during his Democratic presidential campaign for saying he would seek to appeal to “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”

But many Democratic strategists say that while Dean stumbled with his reference to a racially divisive emblem, he put his finger on a key challenge the party faces in the South: persuading enough white voters to join solidly Democratic black voters to forge a winning coalition.

In the 2000 presidential race, Democrat Al Gore, a Tennessee native, won nine out of every 10 black votes in the South, according to polling on election day, but then Texas Gov. Bush prevailed among the region’s white voters by a crushing 2-to-1 ratio. Bush carried every Southern state, including North Carolina, which he won by 13 percentage points.

“The truth of the matter is the Democrats lost white males in the South,” said Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic strategist in Virginia who advised the campaign of Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner in 2001 and is a former consultant for Edwards and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.).

To win in North Carolina and at least a few other Southern states, Saunders said, Democrats have to overcome the perception among many white voters that they are “wrong” on values. Among other things, that means talking frankly about religious faith, but tiptoeing around abortion and gay rights.

Kerry and Edwards both support abortion rights and oppose a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Bush’s position is the opposite. Without even mentioning them, the president underscored those differences on a trip to Raleigh, N.C., this week when he said he “shared values” with Southern voters and asserted that Kerry did not.

Democratic strategists say the party must redefine “values” as pocketbook issues.

“At the kitchen table at night in the South, we don’t sit around and talk about gays,” Saunders said. “We talk about the job we just lost, about the cost of health insurance.”

Many North Carolina voters do fret about the economy -- not because of high unemployment but because of high job turnover. The state jobless rate in May was 5.2%, below the national rate of 5.6%.

In parts of the state that are losing textile, tobacco and furniture jobs, worries about global trade run high. Recent trade agreements with Mexico and China are controversial.

But other industries are rising in their place, including a vibrant high-technology center between Raleigh and Durham. Auto-part plants dot the roads around Roxboro, located near the border with Virginia.

One challenge for Kerry and Edwards will be to persuade North Carolina voters that a major federal healthcare initiative will do more for the economy than Bush’s tax cuts.

On national security, a key issue in a state with many military families, Kerry faces another hurdle: explaining why he tossed away military decorations three decades ago.

Chandler Kirk, 72, a Korean War veteran, said he respected Kerry’s Vietnam War service but not his subsequent antiwar activism. Kirk said he voted Democratic for president decades ago, but abandoned the party as “too liberal, tax-you-to-death, wishy-washy.”

Another challenge for Kerry and Edwards will be to unify the top and the bottom of the Democratic ticket in a year when the entire state Legislature and Gov. Michael F. Easley are up for reelection. To avoid alienating conservative voters, many North Carolina Democrats have long distanced themselves from national party leaders.

Erskine Bowles, the party’s candidate for the Senate seat Edwards is vacating, said he would be “thrilled” to campaign with Kerry and Edwards today at their rally at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He said Kerry “would have been nuts not to put John Edwards on the ticket.”

But Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, said that he would not attend the Democratic National Convention later this month in Boston -- the showcase for the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

As a senator, Bowles pledged he would not “vote with a Democratic administration 90% of the time” but would offer instead a “strong, independent” voice for North Carolina.

Republicans have fewer intraparty tensions. Rep. Richard M. Burr, Bowles’ GOP opponent in the Senate race, is sticking close to Bush. He dared Kerry and Edwards to campaign in North Carolina as much as they want.

“For Democratic activists, this is a dream ticket,” Burr said. “But I’m not sure that a ticket that excites the Democrat activists is a ticket that wins in North Carolina or the rest of the country.”

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Carolina campaign

As Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards hit the campaign trail together as a newly minted ticket, Edwards’ Southern roots could put the state in play for Democrats.

North Carolina at a glance

Population: 8.4 million 60.2% urban; 39.8% rural Most populous cities: Charlotte (540,828); Raleigh (276,093); Greensboro (222,891) Registered voters: 2,422,427 Democrats: 47% (1,767,624) Republicans: 35% (928,450) Unaffiliated: 18% (10,649) Other: 0.2%

Election results 2000 Bush (R) 1,631,163 (56.03%) Gore (D) 1,257,692 (43.2%) Other 22,407 (0.77%)

1996 Dole (R) 1,225,938 (48.73%) Clinton (D) 1,107,849 (44.04%) Perot (I) 168,059 (6.68%) Other 13,961 (0.55%)

1992 Bush (R) 1,134,661 (43.44%) Clinton (D) 1,114,042 (42.65%) Perot (I) 357,864 (13.70%) Other 5,283 (0.2%)

*Numbers may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

Sources: U.S. Census, Almanac of American Politics, Federal Election Commission,North Carolina State Board of Elections, U.S. Election Atlas; Graphics reporting by SUSANNAH ROSENBLATT