Carolina crossfire

“I LOOOOOVE Michelle,” proclaimed an African-American woman at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Charlotte on October 4th—stipulating those extra vowels as testament to her passion for the current first lady, the event’s star turn. The terms the attendees used to describe their feelings for the Democratic candidate herself were cooler: “like” and “support” cropped up more often than “love”. One man frankly admitted to voting for Mrs Clinton out of duty rather than devotion. Her biggest asset in crowds such as this, besides the backing of Michelle Obama and her husband, is fear of Donald Trump. “Let’s turn this mother out,” urged Alma Adams, a congresswoman, to a whoop.

Roughly a quarter of North Carolina’s electorate is black. In 2012 they voted at a higher rate than whites—a showing that could not prevent Mitt Romney narrowly winning back the state for the Republicans, after Barack Obama scraped it, even more narrowly, in 2008 (by a handful of votes per precinct, as Mrs Obama reminded her acolytes in Charlotte). This time, unless Mr Trump can emulate Mr Romney’s performance here, he will likely match his overall defeat. For Mrs Clinton, therefore, the state offers the chance of a knockout blow; her campaign has mounted an energetic voter-registration drive in the hope of delivering it. To an unusual degree, though, the predictably tight contest has been coloured by lively down-ballot races and bubbling local controversies.

Begin with the Senate. If Deborah Ross, a polished but hitherto little-known state representative, manages to unseat Richard Burr, the low-key Republican incumbent, she could help the Democrats retake control of the chamber. On a tour of a printing plant in Lumberton this week, wearing a safety-regulated hairnet but no socks (“it’s a Southern thing”), Mr Burr dispensed backslaps and fist-bumps with seasoned folksiness. Defending his support for Mr Trump, advertised by a bumper sticker, he was less assured. Waterboarding, said Mr Burr, who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was “not coming back”, whatever his party’s nominee said. He maintains that Ms Ross, a former state director of the ACLU, is too left-wing for North Carolina. Yet he and his fellow Republicans have found themselves squirming over social issues, too.

Especially Pat McCrory, the incumbent governor. In March he signed a bill that, among other regressive measures, required transgender people to use public restrooms aligned with the sex on their birth certificates—part of a reactionary tear on which Republicans in the state legislature embarked after winning supermajorities in 2012. Cue lost convention revenue, cancelled concerts and, most painfully for North Carolinians, the relocation of beloved basketball tournaments in protest. Mr Burr wants the governor to reach “a truce” with his adversaries; Roy Cooper, the attorney-general and Mr McCrory’s Democratic challenger, refused to defend the law against a federal suit. “Part of being a good lawyer,” he says, “is telling your clients when to stop.” His opponent has sullied the state’s reputation, Mr Cooper complains, deriding the “Trump-McCrory team”. The governor’s line is that the farrago is an intentional distraction from the state’s economic recovery.

These attacks are pressed home in a dizzying crossfire of TV ads. Besides the discrimination row, two other furores have convulsed North Carolina’s politics. The site of the fatal police shooting of Keith Scott in Charlotte last month is now a calm shrine, but in the fiery aftermath the National Guard was called out and a state of emergency declared. A Republican congressman opined that the black protesters “hate white people, because white people are successful”; he later apologised. Then there was the state’s cynical voting law, which imposed an ID requirement and other restrictions that—said a federal court that squashed it—targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision”.

These upheavals may galvanise voters, black and white, in unpredictable ways. Yet, demographically and politically, the state was already mixed-up. Mr Burr says it is growing rather than changing: that seems wishful thinking, even if the evolution has been slower than in neighbouring Virginia, which, in presidential contests, seems in short order to have become safely Democratic. Around a third of North Carolinians now come from beyond the South, many drawn by its tech and finance industries, a swelling counterbalance to the conservative suburbs and countryside.

For all these wrinkles, and despite a burgeoning list of alleged anti-Trump conspiracies—media bias, skewed opinion polls, the earpiece Mrs Clinton apocryphally wore during the TV debate—the mood among Trump supporters at a get-together in Fayetteville was bullish. Their profane candidate can be sure of the godly vote in this devout region, one said, because if the Democrats are “on the side of any religion, it’s the Muslims”. An enthusiast in a cap emblazoned with “Deplorables” insisted it was they who “pay the taxes in this country”; Mr Trump’s own shiftiness on that score did not trouble him. From his canvassing, Jerry Reinoehl, a genial veteran and campaign volunteer, reckoned his man would do better than expected among minorities. But he needed to focus: by taking Mrs Clinton’s bait, his tweeting and outbursts had “squandered five days”, worried Mr Reinoehl.

If, in fact, the polls are credible, Mr McCrory’s prospects look bleak. The fate of the sockless senator, meanwhile, may be tied to Mr Trump’s. And, in what may turn out to be the decisive swing state, that race is perilously close.