Among the many potent objects in the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield is a slim leather watch the actor gifted to the love of her life after their divorce, which bears the inscription: “To Frank and desert nights, Ava.”
By then, the Hollywood dream machine had transformed Gardner into an exotic who had been plucked from the obscurity and wildness of North Carolina tobacco country. The truth was more complicated. Grabtown, the deep country community of her childhood, is certainly remote and retains an aching summer silence, but the house into which she was born is a handsome and still-functioning private residence. And the Howell Theatre in Smithfield, where she first saw Clark Gable on a trip to the cinema with her mother, Mollie, stands as a gorgeous relic of art-deco cinema houses.
Gardner lived for 67 years with scarcely a dull moment and although she was an exile from the US for the second half of her life, she could never fully quit her hometown and made regular private visits from Spain and London for family get-togethers and even a school reunion. She would have observed, on those occasional raids, the startling transformation of Raleigh, where the nearest airport is located. In 1950 Raleigh was home to 65,000 people. By the turn of the century 276,000 lived there. By 2020 that number had risen to 487,000 people and it continues to be one of the US’s most-moved-to small cities.
The short story on North Carolina politics is that was rigorously Democratic until the late 1960s. But since Lyndon Johnson left office in 1968, North Carolina has returned just two Democratic presidents: Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008. Of its 100 counties, just 20 could be classed as urban, but counties such as Wake (population 1.2 million) and Mecklenburg (1.1 million) are the engines for phenomenal growth in education and tech and bioscience. Satellite rural counties, such as Ava Gardner’s Johnston County (234,000), are benefiting from that glow of prosperity. But there are entire pockets of the state whose farming and manufacturing traditions have been hollowed out.
This November, the Democratic Party believes it has an opportunity to turn the state blue again. Recent national polls have been inexplicably slow in recognising North Carolina has moved from a purple state to a bona fide swing state. Four years ago, it was the state Joe Biden lost by the narrowest margin. But since Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, polling shows it to be razor thin, which is a deeply concerning development for the Republican strategists.
“I don’t know that it’s a state that the Democrats need to win. It is absolutely a state the Republicans need to win,” says Chris Cooper, professor and director of the Haire public policy institute at Western Carolina University.
“I just don’t see a path to the White House for Donald Trump without North Carolina. For the last few years in North Carolina politics, every week we would see more new registered Republicans than Democrats, but we have seen a reversal of that since the big switch from Biden to Harris. It has declined a little in the last week or so but there is still this new reality where the Democrats are doing a slightly better job that the Republicans of engaging voters.
“So, my expectations are that, you know, North Carolina was the smallest margin of every state that Trump won in 2020: it was just on the Red side of the razor’s edge. I don’t know which side of that edge we will be on in November, but we will be right smack in the middle of the country.”
Dan Blue is the Democratic minority leader of the North Carolina state Senate. On Tuesday, we sat for a coffee in the sunshine – with a faint hint of collegiate autumn – near his law offices. The coffee shop and adjacent restaurant are located in the old Raleigh Times newspaper building, on East Hargett Street.
Inside, the music and menu are on-trend, and the fashionably distressed walls carry marvellous relics from the Times – an old newspaper delivery boy’s bag, yellowed clippings and a series of stunning photographs, including John Kennedy campaigning in the town in September 1960 and “Pistol Pete” Maravich playing a high school basketball game in 1964.
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The sport is close to a religion in North Carolina. Blue has been an ardent Duke Blue Devils basketball fans since the 1960s. He talks me through the story of desegregation in the college game. His son-in-law, Jeff Capel, played on a famous 1990s Duke team and is now head coach of Pittsburgh. Just eight miles separate the Duke and North Carolina campuses, and their annual basketball matchups are known as the Tobacco Road classic: it has become one of the enshrined rivalries in American sport.
This year, Duke has recruited the number one high school player in America, Cooper Flagg. Hopes are high. “It’s a basketball fanatical area. It is part of the everyday conversation,” says Blue, who laughs when I suggest he won’t have much time to sit in Cameron stadium this year. “Oh, I’ll be there.”
Although he acknowledges that political dynamic in North Carolina can be crudely split into urban/rural, the full picture is more kaleidoscopic.
“I think that is present. It is geographic. But, up on the Virginia border there are 11 counties, eight of which are predominantly black – it is called the Black Belt. Which is strictly rural but Democrats do exceptionally well in that zone. What has happened in the southeastern part of the state, from the ocean to the Charlotte suburbs, it has turned most drastically from Democrat to Republican. It was more dependent on farming and textiles, and the middle of the state depended on furniture. And the bottom fell out of all those at the same time. People didn’t see anything happening that benefited them. And now, schools are grossly underfunded. Their health systems were failing because the Republicans they elected would not expand Medicaid. So we see a pathway back.”
The Republican Party took control of the North Carolina state Senate in 2010. But only one Republican politician has occupied the governor’s mansion since 1993. That was Pat McCrory, whose term was dominated by the notorious 2017 House Bill 2 or “Bathroom Bill”. Officially it required people to use public restrooms according to their birth-cert gender status, in effect discriminating against transgender people and LGBT rights. It caused a furore: an All-Star NBA game was pulled; universities and businesses reported a sudden difficulty in getting people to relocate; and the estimated future economic cost to the state came close to $4 billion. It was killed. McCory lost the governorship to Roy Cooper, who served two terms.
This year’s gubernatorial election race to succeed him is one of the most-high profile of all the upcoming governorships in the US. Josh Stein, the Democratic nominee, is the state’s attorney general. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate, exploded on to the state’s public consciousness when he gave a speech about gun freedom and rights for law-abiding citizens to the Greensboro City Council in 2018. Robinson spoke in compelling, everyday language and had a powerful delivery and it resonated. Now he is lieutenant governor of the state Senate and running to become North Carolina’ s first black governor.
On Tuesday night, as part of a lightning tour of the state, he made a scheduled stop at the Crossroads Grill in Siler City in Chatham County, a 40-minute drive from Raleigh through winding roads and verdant countryside.
About 100 people show up to munch on cheeseburgers and fried okra at the roadside restaurant until Robinson arrives in a black SUV, to pose for photographs and meet people before giving a short, punchy talk. He’s a powerfully built man and a natural communicator, and there is an undertone of anger in his message. Robinson is a controversial figure: on the hard right of Maga-ism and scrutinised for a series of past derogatory statements about Jews, Muslims, transgender people and scathing about black Democrats.
Robinson’s stance is that he has been vilified by a mainstream media cabal in cahoots with the liberal elites. When the Republicans regained the Senate, he tells his audience at the restaurant, “this state was dead broke. Six billion dollars in debt to the federal government. Firing state workers because we couldn’t afford to pay them. Teachers pay frozen for six years. That’s a whole lot more powerful than a statement on Facebook, folks. [Stein] doesn’t walk the walk about the fact that under his watch, rates have gone up 61 per cent. The truth of the matter is he was a horrible legislator. He was a horrible attorney general. And he will be a terrible governor. Republicans took over in 2010.
“Where are we at now? We’ve got a $5 billion surplus. We were the number one business destination two years running. Republicans are focused on the substantive issues. We’re not focused on the trash and mud that Josh Stein and these reporters are focused on. Every time you turn on the TV, it’s another salacious story about another politician that they can’t stand.
“If there is one prayer I have for this country, it’s that the media would get its collective head out of its rear end and start reporting the news. They abuse their God-given rights of the first amendment. When was the last time you heard the things I just said, which are facts?” he says.
“They don’t want to talk about all the businesses that were destroyed under governor Cooper ... We gotta build the western part of the state, the eastern part of the state. We have said that a thousand times but you will never hear it on the television.”
His speech draws several calls of “Preach” and “Amen”. It is well received. When a lone local television reporter approaches Robinson with his microphone and cameraman, he is waved off and two security men block his path.
Recent polls show Robinson trailing by 4-7 per cent. But Dan Blue believes those margins will probably shrink again. “Trump was in Asheboro recently so they are working hard in the middle counties. This stuff always bounces back because we are so divided.”
Still, Blue is optimistic that Democratic improvements in the state are beginning to show. During Covid, schoolchildren in some of the rural counties had to find a McDonald’s or public library for wifi to do their homework. The Biden administration’s Bead programme is facilitating a $1.53 billion high-speed internet roll-out across the state. Some less wealthy rural counties, struggling to meet the one-third salary contributions to the basic state salary, are finding it difficult to attract and keep high-school teachers, who can earn more in the wealthier, urban counties.
“So, we are reclaiming territory we never should have lost in the first place,” says Blue.
“Economic opportunity. Bringing in the type of jobs where they don’t have to work two or three jobs and still don’t make ends meet. It’s trying to figure out creative ways to bring industry or jobs, regardless of what area there are in.”
I doubt there are any 50-acre tobacco farmers now. The little guys were pulverised. And at the same time the textiles were going to the east
— Dan Blue
The border to Granville County, north of Wake, is just a half-hour drive from the metropolitan centre. It is designated as one of the six pivot counties in North Carolina, which went from Obama to Trump in 2016. Liz Purvis, the Granville Democratic County chairwoman, believes a significant number of her party voters simply stayed away from the polling booths in 2016 and 2020.
“I think that is changing as we see a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris and what her administration could do. But I think that folks in rural America, in rural North Carolina, have not always felt seen and heard from government, whether our local general assembly or congresspeople. I do feel that is changing in the way the Democratic Party treats rural America, and the Biden bipartisan Bill has possibly influenced places in North Carolina. And, you know, Joe Biden lost by 42 votes per precinct in North Carolina. That’s a handful of conversations a week, which I think and hope we are having this time.”
Towns in Granville will be courted by both parties over the next few months. North Carolina is up for grabs and it’s a state in flux. When Ava Gardner was in her pomp, one of the distinguishing features of the countryside was the half a million “tobacco barns”, tall plain structures crafted from rough-hewn timber and stone. Fewer than 50,000 remain. When Blue grew up in Robeson County, anyone with five acres could make a living farming tobacco before the industry moved to huge, corporate farms.
“I doubt there are any 50-acre tobacco farmers now. The little guys were pulverised. And at the same time the textiles were going to the east.”
Revitalising the vast areas hurt by those transformations is the key task for all political leaders. As Chris Cooper puts it, “the question of how’s-a-going often depends on your zip code.”
The Smithfield zip code, 27577, is doing fine and the Ava Gardner Museum takes pride of place on its main street. The original museum, set up by locals, was in a teacherage her family ran in Grabtown in the 1930s. In the era of roadmaps, visitors sometimes struggled to find it. One evening in 1985, among the visitors was Gardner herself, who decided to call in with her sisters. But it was closed and, unwilling to make a fuss, she turned down offers to have it opened for a private tour. When she died five years later, she was buried in the family plot in Sunset Memorial, ending her internal dilemma about the movie stardom she had never sought.
“I should have stayed there,” she said of home a during a 1967 interview in Esquire. “The ones who never left home don’t have a pot to pee in, but they’re happy. Me, look at me. What did it bring me?”
To the end, she was a vivid embodiment to the North Carolina state motto: “To be rather than to seem (Esse quam videri)”, and in her home place they adore her for that.
But figuring out what North Carolina itself should seek to be over the coming decades is the source of all election conversation in a riveting battle for hearts and minds in Tar Heel country.
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