The U.S. News presidential race cover package also includes some interesting blurbs about the Tar Heel State.
The magazine labels North Carolina one of 18 “battleground” states (despite Republicans’ streak of seven straight wins) and says this state’s electoral outcome could be decided by groups grouped as “academic,” “African-American,” and “working class and rural.”
And frequent John Locke Foundation Headliner Michael Barone writes his latest column:
The other region where Obama is running better than Kerry or Al Gore is
the string of states originally settled by southern planters?and their
slaves?from Virginia south through the Carolinas and Georgia and west
to Alabama and Mississippi. None was a target state in 2000 or 2004,
but culturally liberal suburbanites in the Northern Virginia suburbs
and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, plus possibly higher black
turnout, may be moving them toward Obama.
