Read on Twitter
This was Robeson County in 2020. The county voted 58.9% for Donald Trump and 40.3% for Joe Biden. [LONG THREAD]
![This was Robeson County in 2020. The county voted 58.9% for Donald Trump and 40.3% for Joe Biden. [LONG THREAD]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/En0qNlLXMAANlU8.jpg "This was Robeson County in 2020. The county voted 58.9% for Donald Trump and 40.3% for Joe Biden. [LONG THREAD]")
This county is 70% POC and has overwhelmingly voted for the democrat in every presidential election from 1976 - 2012. In 2016, however, it swung hard right from voting 58% for Barack Obama to just under 51% for Donald Trump. Many blame social conservatism for this swing, but...
...I believe this misses the bigger picture. Robeson County is 38.02% Native American, 32.8% White, 25.11% Black, 4.86% Hispanic/Latino, 0.39% Asian/Pacific Islander, 2.26% Other Races, and 1.41% Multiracial. This would appear on its face to be a solidly Democratic County, ...
...but recent trends indicate otherwise. Robeson County is home to the Lumbee Tribe, the largest in North Carolina (yes, even bigger than the Eastern Band of Cherokee) and the largest east of the Mississippi River. While most Native Americans nationwide voted...
...Democratic and have done so for decades, the Lumbee appear to have bucked the trend in recent years and have started becoming more and more Republican, especially in Presidential elections. While I do think part of this is due to social...
...conservatism (gun rights and opposition to abortion rights in particular), this does not paint the entire picture. The county swung TOWARDS Barack Obama in 2012, for example, even when that was the election where Obama and Biden finally endorsed same-sex marriage, and the...
...same year Obama called for increased gun control regulations after the Sandy Hook Elementary and Aurora movie theater mass shootings. Robeson County has seen economic decline and stagnation in recent decades, which many there blame on NAFTA, for example. ...
...However, this still misses what the Lumbee want the most: federal recognition. While the Lumbee are recognized by the state of North Carolina, they only have partial federal recognition. While this may seem like a blip on the radar to people who are not policy wonks, ...
...this excludes the Lumbee Tribe from a variety of benefits (particularly in education and healthcare) that fully recognized tribes are eligible for. As Robeson County is the poorest in the entire state and the area is declining economically, the people here...
...need this desperately. While Obama supported federally recognizing the tribe while in Congress, the bill to recognize the tribe during his presidency died in the senate, and as a result, no full recognition. Understandably, this frustrated quite a bit of people there and...
...combined with Trump’s rhetoric about the “forgotten man” left behind by “horrible trade deals like NAFTA”, this really resonated in Robeson and as a result, Trump was able to win the county in 2016, as seen below:
While this map is vaguely similar to the one in the first tweet, this one is important because it shows Hillary Clinton doing slightly better than Biden in the Lumbee-majority precincts of the county (generally the northern and west-central regions). Why this difference? ...
...Low-propensity Trump voters. While Trump dramatically improved over his 2016 performance here, Biden improved over Hillary as well. The difference was Biden only gained a tiny handful of votes here, while Trump gained 7,000 (1/10 of his statewide margin over Biden!)...
...How? Low-propensity Trump voters (mostly rural voters with no college degrees who don’t normally vote in presidential elections, but maybe go to some of Trump’s rallies and like what they see so they go vote just for him). While this was a thing in other NC counties, ...
...particularly whiter and rural ones, Robeson County saw explosive turnout among this type of voter, most likely a result of Biden holding a rally in the county seat of Lumberton shortly before the election where he announced support for full Lumbee recognition. ...
...While Biden and Harris both promised full recognition to the tribe, their pitches probably mostly went unheard, as people without college degrees in general (Lumbees and Robeson County in general disproportionately lack college degrees) tend to not pay as much attention to...
...politics as those who do. In addition, those who did hear of it probably distrusted Biden due to him being in politics so long while the issue remained unsolved (not really his fault, but we can’t expect every voter to pay enough attention to detail to look up his...
...voting record on the issue). As I stated above, almost 1/10 of Trump’s statewide margin in NC came from Robeson alone, and if Democrats want to win the state without having to wait potentially 10-15 years for the cities and suburbs to get blue enough to counteract...
...the rural R trend, they are going to need to find a way to either carry or reduce margins in Robeson once again. Luckily, a certain congressional candidate named Dan McCready proved that this may not be such a tall order after all.
In 2018, Dan McCready ran as a democrat to Represent NC-09 (which includes all of Robeson County along with south Charlotte and most of the Sandhills region in general) in Congress, and just barely lost to incumbent Republican Mark Harris. Noticeably, he won Robeson...
...and his winning margin looked a lot more like Obama’s 2012 blowout than Trump’s narrow 2016 win:
While McCready lost overall (maybe or maybe not partially due to the Harris campaign pulling actual voter fraud in adjacent Bladen County), he somehow figured out how to appeal to these voters in a way neither Hillary nor Biden could. ...
...In 2019, there was a do-over election due to the aforementioned Bladen County incident where McCready narrowly lost again, this time to Dan Bishop (one of the architects of the infamous “bathroom bill”). Dan Bishop drastically overperformed Mark Harris in Robeson, ...
...reducing Dan McCready to a narrow win in Robeson. Many use this to argue that social conservatism is helping republicans and hurting dems in Robeson, and while many including myself subscribed to this argument as recently as a few days ago, I have recently realized...
...that this data cannot be extrapolated due to the do-over election having barely half the turnout of the original 2018:
If Democrats want to flip NC in the 2022 Senate race and the 2024 presidential and Council of State elections, they are going to need to do something to solve their Robeson County problem or else their hopes are almost foreclosed on for at least the next 5 years. Listening to...
...any advice they could get from Dan McCready, recognizing the tribe in Congress, and VISITING THE COUNTY between now and 2022 would be a great start. ...
...DISCLAIMER: I am not a Lumbee and I have no affiliation with the Lumbee Tribe or Robeson County in any way. The information presented here is from an amalgamation of Wikipedia binges, the NCSBE site, conversations with Lumbees I’ve had on Twitter, and interviews of Lumbees...
...in other sites’ election-related news coverage. If you are a Lumbee and you are reading this, feel free to correct me if you feel my analysis, in whole or in part, is incorrect.
@McCreadyForNC @AresRound2 @ElectionMapsCo @SenhorRaposa @DanDHNguyen01 @SammysWorld2 @Yukongold1898 @Cat19Green @StephieTheLefty @_alex_joshua @ECaliberSeven @7th_ET @ohheckerman @AndrewMystic56 @EthanCKelly @D_llack @OregonBlueDog @OrgEaglePatriot @Uncrewed
