(The Center Square) – As polls turn up the heat in the race for the White House, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper poured more fuel on the battleground fire from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
During a network interview Wednesday morning, the governor took a rip at what cannot be controlled: the family situations born into by the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance.
Cooper – a second-term Democratic governor who has won 13 consecutive elections over the last 40 years – reasoned that the early backgrounds of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would connect better with voters in North Carolina, turning the state blue for only the third time since Lyndon B. Johnson won in 1964.
Speaking on MSNBC, the 67-year-old Cooper said, “Isn’t it amazing that our presidential nomination and vice-presidential nominee came from middle-class families? They can tell those real stories of working at McDonald’s, of being a high school football coach – things that people can relate to.
“And I think that people are going to be excited to hear from people like that. Not people born into privilege, not people who were born into wealth, but who have worked hard and made it, and who care about them,” he said. “Think about the fact that, Kamala Harris has spent her life trying to help working families get ahead while Donald Trump has spent his life trying to rip them off. And I think people are going to understand that. Enough North Carolinians are going to make sure this happens, and we’re excited about winning the state.”
Aside from Johnson, only Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama carried the state in 1976 and 2008, respectively. Both candidates lost four years later.
North Carolina has 16 electoral college votes and is considered one of seven key battleground states representing 93 electoral college votes. The others are Pennsylvania (19), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (six).
While Trump enjoyed a cushioned edge over President Joe Biden in the state since the campaign season began, Harris’s insertion 31 days ago changed the landscape.
Reports soon surfaced that Cooper was on a shortlist for the vice president’s running mate, though he withdrew himself from consideration days before Walz was chosen.
It would not be a surprise if spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Trump came to Asheville last week and was in the Piedmont community of Asheboro on Wednesday, along with Vance.
Trump, a 78-year-old son of German immigrants, was born and raised in an upscale community of Queens. At 13, behavioral challenges landed him in a military academy. While attending the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s, he began to make his mark as a businessman by investing in real estate. After his older brother died from complications of alcoholism in 1981, Trump said pressure to join the family business had taken its toll on the troubled airline pilot. He later told multiple media outlets that the experience gave him an empathetic perspective when addressing the opioid epidemic decades later during his first presidential term.
Vance, a 40-year-old author of New York Times Bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, was raised in a middle-class family that struggled with upward mobility from his grandparents’ “dirt poor” Kentucky Appalachia beginnings. Abuse, alcoholism, poverty and trauma underpinned his life, and from the stage in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention he told his mom it was his hope to celebrate her 10 years of being clean in the White House come January.
Harris, the 59-year-old daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, was mostly raised by her mother after her parents divorced when she was 7. She was among the first kindergarteners to ride on integrated buses in California. She later attended Vanier College in Montreal and Howard University in Washington, D.C.
While at Howard, she worked at McDonald’s and mailroom clerked for California Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston.
Walz, the 60-year-old son of a community activist and public school administrator, was raised in rural Valentine, Neb. He was an outdoorsman of sorts and played three sports in high school. He moved to his wife Gwen’s native southern Minnesota as an educator, eventually leaving the field for politics as a member of Congress.
