UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: He’s running away.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Go, Alex. Go.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
…Where Alex Cook, Adon Bermudez-Bey 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.
ALEX COOK: Hey, how you doing? Can we get five minutes of your time?
JAKAI BRITTON: Five minutes? I’m late for the airport.
ADON BERMUDEZ-BEY: It’ll be worth it.
COOK: It’ll be worth it.
DETROW: That voter, Jakai Britton, says no. He’s got to run. He’s off to the airport. But to this organizing team, the stakes for 2024, and in this state especially, are too high to let Britton go just yet.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: …We need is three minutes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Laughter).
COOK: It’s important. It’s going to change your life.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: Two minutes.
BRITTON: All right.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: Yay, we got him. We got him.
DETROW: 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.
COOK: You need health care though, right? You get SSI.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Yes.
COOK: So you need your heath care.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Yes.
BRITTON: I get SSI.
COOK: Yeah. So do we have a vote for you?
BRITTON: You got a vote from me.
COOK: All right.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Thank you.
COOK: Let me get you some of this literature, sir.
DETROW: 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?
COOK: I think it’s a vote because if he – 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 got a mom in there inside. I know she need health care.
DETROW: Down Home North Carolina is a nonprofit 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOORBELL CHIME)
AUTOMATED VOICE: We can’t answer the door right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, you can do it now.
COOK: They don’t open the door all the time, so 1 out of 10 doors you might get someone.
DETROW: 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.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: There are some police coming.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Oh, they called the police, Adon.
DETROW: 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-Bey and his team of volunteers are finding all of these Democratic doors to knock on.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: What I notice is that there’s a lot of people who want to stay out the way. They see the Trump signs. They see what’s going on, on the school board, 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, those who are hesitant…
DETROW: This is the exact type of work that North Carolina State Democratic Chair Anderson Clayton says is crucial to building up the party’s competitiveness in the Tar Heel State.
ANDERSON CLAYTON: 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.
DETROW: 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.
CLAYTON: 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.
DETROW: 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.
CLAYTON: 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 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
DETROW: Back in Nashville, Down Home door-knockers make their pitch to another potential voter.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Here are the candidates that we have indorsed – Josh Stein.
DETROW: 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.
SEAN JONES: 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.
DETROW: 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. Adon Bermudez-Bey, Down Home’s regional field director, fits that bill even though he’s leading this group of canvassers who have endorsed Harris.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: I don’t know if I’m voting for Kamala yet – just full transparency – but I know that I’m definitely not voting for Trump.
DETROW: 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 2, 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 Down Home’s work.
BERMUDEZ-BEY: 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.
DETROW: 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.
LYNN JONES: I just feel like Donald Trump is for billionaires and not for working-class people.
DETROW: 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.
DONNELL JONES: No reason. I just didn’t.
DETROW: Yeah.
D JONES: That’s all. No big issue about it. I just didn’t ever do it.
DETROW: Lynn says the two of them had a series of conversations in recent weeks about him joining her to vote.
L JONES: I just thought, you know, he was at a age where this just should have happened a lot sooner. But I know sometimes people are stuck in their ways, so I didn’t pressure him, just, hey, let’s go vote together then.
DETROW: And the result…
D JONES: I voted for the lady.
DETROW: …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.
On tomorrow’s ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we look at a key part of Trump’s coalition in North Carolina, conservative Christian voters, and talk to a Raleigh pastor about why they stuck with Trump through all the years, as our series We, The Voters continues.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
