Few Democrats have been
more successful at making
forays into Republican turf
than North Carolina Gov.
Mike Easley. In 2004, he
won re-election, 56 percent to 43 percent,
while President Bush was carrying
the state by the same 13 point
margin.
Easley's success in a state that has
not voted for a Democratic presidential
candidate in 30 years and has not
elected a Democratic Senate candidate
in a presidential year since 1968 is
remarkable by any standard.
And a look at the numbers in
2004 shows that while Easley ran
well across the Tar Heel State, he did
best in precisely the high-growth
areas where Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry (whose running-
mate, of course, was North
Carolina Sen. John Edwards) notably
struggled.
According to an analysis of the 2004
vote by Ferrell Guillory of the
University of North Carolina's Program
on Southern Politics, Media, and
Public Life, Easley ran 8 percentage
points ahead of Kerry in urban communities,
15 points ahead in rural
areas, and fully 19 points ahead in
suburban North Carolina. His
improvement over the national ticket's
performance was also notable among
voters at higher income levels. He ran 8 points ahead of Kerry among voters
earning less than $15,000 per
year, and only 5 points ahead among
those earning more than $15,000 but
less than $30,000. But up the rest of
the income ladder he registered double-
digit percentage gains; most
notably, he ran 20 points ahead of
the Democratic presidential candidate
among voters earning between
$75,000 and $100,000 per year.
While Easley obviously did well
statewide, it's not as though his campaign
was originally a slam-dunk. His opponent
was State Senate Minority Leader
Patrick Ballentine, who was being touted
as the fresh face of North Carolina
Republicanism after upending 2000 Republican
gubernatorial nominee Richard
Vinroot in the primary. The nationally
renowned pundit Larry Sabato of the
University of Virginia even rated the race
a toss-up in the summer of 2004.
One key to Easley's success was
simply strategic audacity. He refused
to concede any part of the state to the
GOP, and he campaigned aggressively
in core Republican base areas.
But another key was his record in
office.
If you ask political commentators
in North Carolina to describe Easley's
strength as a candidate, they will
inevitably lead off by answering that
he is a centrist. He pleads guilty to
being a stubborn advocate for
increased education funding and
strong accountability standards. At
the same time, he has been an avid
promoter of North Carolina's nation-leading
business climate and a firm
proponent of budgetary discipline. In
that sense, Easley is part of what has
been called North Carolina's tradition
of modernizer governors.
Being governor is also an inherently
centrist job. Because states have constitutional
balanced-budget requirements,
it's not wise for a governor to throw
things out of whack by cutting taxes or
increasing spending too much. And
voters in virtually every state will withhold
support from ideologues who
would claim that it is not their job to
improve public schools or bring in new
jobs.
While not considered an environmentalist,
Easley brokered passage of
stalled Clean Smokestacks legislation
with the state's initially resistant utility
companies. The North Carolina
Association of Educators strongly supported
his Democratic primary opponent
in 2000. Yet he has pushed
through a proposal for pre-kindergarten
for at-risk 4-year-olds, as well as
class-size reductions for kindergarten
through third grade. He is also raising
teacher salaries beyond the national
average, as well as instituting a comprehensive
high school reform package,
recently featured in Newsweek.
North Carolina's unemployment
rate of 4.3 percent is comfortably
below the national average, with an
impressive rate of job growth. In every
year but one under Easley, North
Carolina has led the nation in Site
Selection magazine's rankings of states
with the best climates for locating and
expanding businesses. And the state
has also improved its ranking as one
of the top states in such cutting-edge
industries as biotechnology and nanotechnology.
But it's Easley's background and
character that have probably done
even more than his record in making
voters more comfortable with him
than with some national Democrats.
As a criminal prosecutor and as North
Carolina's attorney general, he gained
capital convictions against a number
of murderers. When drug kingpins
put out murder contracts on him and
his family, Easley started keeping a
gun with him and taught his prosecutor
wife to use one as well.
One of Easley's most unusual
character traits is his fascination with
the strangely ordinary people on Fox
TV's Southern-based television show,
King of the Hill. As anyone who
knows him well will tell you, he's
convinced that people who watch
this show represent an ostensibly
conservative group that is actually
open to the right kind of progressive
appeal. They have politically unorthodox
and unpredictable worldviews
that are not liberal, but clearly
not right-wing, either; they have a
keen instinct for phoniness; and
most of them like elected officials
who can get things done.
As he prepared for his 2004 re-election
race, Easley took the extraordinary
step of polling King of the Hill viewers in
North Carolina, a rather significant 39
percent of all voters. He discovered that
they tended to be disproportionately
young, white voters (60 percent), white
men age 18 to 59 (59 percent), and non-college-
educated white men (45 percent).
These are all, of course, segments
of the national electorate where
Democrats have lost crucial
support in recent years.
In 2004, Easley won
42 percent of the white
male vote (Kerry took 25
percent), and even won a
third of white Christian
fundamentalist voters (Kerry took 16
percent). His ability to connect with
King of the Hill voters paid off with
deep inroads into normally Republican
constituencies, without in any
way compromising his progressive
values and policy agenda.
A truly authentic centrist in both
his personality and his record, Mike
Easley embodies an approach to politics
that puts skeptical voters at ease
and enables him to expand his party's
base. "Life is hard enough being yourself,
much less trying to be someone
else," says Easley.
