Democrats are vying for the support of rural voters in North Carolina
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I'm in Nash County, North Carolina, where Alex Cook, Adan Bermudez-Bay, and other door knockers have spotted a registered voter. A voter getting into his black SUV to drive away, sure. But a voter nonetheless. They spring into action. It'll be worth it. That voter, Ja'Kai Britton, says no. He's got to run. He's off to the airport.

To this organizing team, the stakes for 2024, and in this state especially, are too high to let Britton go just yet. And they're in. Britton, who is registered as a non-affiliated voter, says he's not planning on casting a ballot this year.

Cook, from the organizing group Down Home North Carolina, starts peppering him with questions about the issues he's facing in his life. You need health care though, right? You get SSI, so you need your health care. I get SSI. Yes, so do we have a vote for you? All right, let me give you some of this literature, sir. From driving away to a conversation. From a no on voting to a maybe.

All in the span of just a couple minutes. Do you think he was just being polite to end the conversation or do you think that's a vote? I think it's a vote because at first he was saying no, no, no, no, no. But once he realized that his Social Security can be affected from this and his health care can be affected. And he's saying he's got a mom in there so I know she needs health care. Down Home North Carolina is a non-profit organizing in rural communities across the state. They say their platform is survival.

helping poor and working class people get basic needs met, like housing and education. In an election season like this one, they're mostly focused on local races, but they endorse candidates up and down the ticket, usually Democrats.

Most of the time is spent urging residents, especially residents of color, to get out and vote. We can't answer the door right now, but if you'd like to leave a message, you can do it now. They don't open the door all the time, so one out of ten doors you might get someone. And they typically face other challenges. There's a lot of walking in pretty hot weather, even in this time of year.

And two different times while we tag along with them, despite no laws being broken, patrol cars from the county sheriff linger near the organizers. There's some police coming. Oh, they caught the police. Nash County is in a rural part of this key swing state. It's near evenly divided between white and black residents. In the recent presidential elections, it was near evenly divided by its results. President Joe Biden won the county by two-tenths of a point in 2020.

Four years before that, former President Donald Trump won it by the exact same razor-thin margin. But driving around the tiny town of Nashville, where they're canvassing today, it doesn't feel that way. There are Trump signs everywhere, a mix of homemade and official, plus plenty of MAGA flags.

Still, Bermudez Bay and his team of volunteers are finding all of these Democratic doors to knock on. What I notice is that there's a lot of people who want to stay out of the way. They see the Trump signs. They see what's going on in school boards, city council. They're just like, I'm going to stay out of it. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to tell them, like, there's an organization that specifically focuses in rural areas to pull those folks out. Consider this. North Carolina hasn't chosen a Democrat for president since 2008.

If the Harris-Walls campaign is going to change that, it needs more rural Democrats to turn out. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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It's Consider This from NPR. In Nash County, North Carolina, 45 minutes northeast of Raleigh, the organization Down Home is out knocking on doors. They're trying to encourage potential voters to get out and cast their ballots, particularly to vote for the Democratic candidates the group has endorsed.

This is the exact type of work that North Carolina's state Democratic chair, Anderson Clayton, says is crucial to building up the party's competitiveness in the Tar Heel state. The single most powerful form of voter suppression is gerrymandering, like in any case scenario, because it makes people feel like their votes don't matter. We talked to Clayton a few days before heading to Nash County. North Carolina has some of the most extreme partisan-drawn maps in the nation.

The state has a Democratic governor in office, but Republicans hold a supermajority in the statehouse.

Clayton, who's 26 and from rural Person County, has made reaching out to rural Democrats a key part of her strategy. Joe Biden lost this state by 74,000 votes in 2020, which we know is a field margin and that can come from all of our counties across the state. That means juicing up turnout in the cities and suburbs, sure, but it also means convincing Democrats in more rural areas that their vote matters, that it's worth it to show up at the polls.

It matters to the results, even if those extra votes are on the margins, because North Carolina has more rural voters than any other 2024 presidential swing state. I'm not going to win rural North Carolina this year. Like, I'm trying to break back margins in it. There's a difference in talking or trying to talk to rural voters and talking to rural Democrats. And you need to do one before you do the other. And I'm like, I'm going to win.

I'm trying to talk to rural Democrats this year, people that showed up in 2008 that ain't showed up since because they haven't had somebody to vote for and they didn't feel like their vote actually mattered.

Back in Nashville, down-home door knockers make their pitch to another potential voter. Here are the candidates that we have endorsed, Josh Stein. Sean Jones tells us he plans on voting, though in the presidential race he hasn't quite made up his mind. He's leaning toward Vice President Kamala Harris. I just recently went to go see my brother in prison this weekend, and he was kind of like on my head about it, like voting. He wanted me to vote for Trump, but I still wanted to vote for Kamala, so like, I'm still trying to, like...

Look into the politics as far as like what's what and who's who. With two weeks to go before Election Day, finding a true undecided voter feels like a rarity.

But Jones actually isn't the only voter we meet who tells us he's still unsure. Adan Bermudez-Bey, Down Home's regional field director, fits that bill, even though he's leading this group of canvassers who have endorsed Harris. I don't know if I'm voting for Conway yet, just full transparency. But I know that I'm definitely not voting for Trump. Speaking just for himself, Bermudez-Bey says he has concerns about Harris, her time as a prosecutor in California, her support for Israel during the ongoing war in the Middle East.

He set a deadline for himself. November 2nd, the last day of early voting in North Carolina. That's when he'll decide between Harris or a third-party candidate. In the meantime, though, his pragmatic political side sees the merits of a Harris presidency, at least for Downholm's work. No, it's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be a lot easier for us to organize under her presidency than Trump's.

That general feeling, the motivation of voting against Trump rather than for Harris, is in the air a dozen miles away at an early voting site in Rocky Mount, Nash County. I just feel like Donald Trump is for billionaires and not for working class people. Lynn Jones has just cast her ballot. She's walking back to the car with her neighbor, Donnell Jones, no relation, who has just voted for the very first time in his life. No reason, I just didn't. That's all.

Lynn says the two of them had a series of conversations in recent weeks about him joining her to vote. And the result? Was one more vote in the bank for Harris.

If Democrats are going to win Nash County and win North Carolina, it's going to be through thousands of interactions like what Down Home is doing and what, on a more casual level, Lynn Jones did with Donnell Jones, nudging others to show up and vote, regardless of how disengaged or skeptical they were at the beginning of those conversations. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Tyler Bartlam. It was edited by Ashley Brown. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

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