In many ways, he’s running a campaign that revives the old Southern strategy, practiced by Barry Goldwater and, more craftily, by Richard Nixon, of peeling disaffected white voters away from the Democratic Party with dog-whistle racism and a certain amount of sympathy for the lowered prospects of the working class. Trump is sure, naturally, that he’ll “do great” with that approach in the so-called solid South—solid for Democrats, from Reconstruction until the civil-rights era; solid for Republicans thereafter.
.. Trump declared, “People of North Carolina want strength, protection, and jobs ..
.. the South is no longer all that solid. In many places, North Carolina among them, Trump’s rummage-sale version of the Southern strategy is as likely to activate voters against him as it is to insure a G.O.P. victory.
.. An angry white man killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill last year, but the Muslim community in the area proved vibrant enough not only to survive that assault but to launch new institutions, including a scholarship at North Carolina State, programs to aid Syrian refugees, and a local thrift store whose proceeds go to charities the victims supported
.. What’s also important, though, in loosening the Republican lock on the South is what’s known as in-migration—people moving from other states, especially in the Northeast, to growing metropolitan areas of the South, like the Research Triangle in North Carolina.