The Toronto Globe and Mail has picked up the Harrell-as-Obama meme.
With Bloomberg's Al Hunt declaring state Rep. Ty Harrell as the harbinger of Barack Obama's success in North Carolina, the Canadian newspaper makes the same parallel in a story today:
Ty Harrell is a young, black state Representative who defeated the Republican incumbent in 2006 in a district that is 90 per cent white. White, but with one of the highest concentrations of PhDs per capita in the nation. (UNC at Chapel Hill is only one of several universities in the region.)
In the city of Cary, which Mr. Harrell represents, “the faces are changing, the sounds changing, the language is changing,” as he describes it.
"The people moving here look at the people who have been here all of their lives and they're saying: 'This isn't how we do it in New York, or New Jersey, or Rhode Island or Oregon.'" But because they're new arrivals, divorced from their new home's complex political culture, many of them don't bother to vote. They, Mr. Harrell believes, are the third tranche of Mr. Obama's voter registration drive, because they generally come from Democratic states. "Because of the growth, we have to get those people registered," he says. "And then we have to turn those people who are registered into voters, and appeal to them in a way they haven't been appealed to before."
Blog RSS feed
McCrory bucking trends per Harrell
Interesting comment that the moderate Republican is threatening to break the Democratic hold on Raleigh. I spoke with a staunch democrat on Saturday who lives in Raleigh and that is firmly behind Obama and she said that she and all of her democratic friends are voting for McCrory.
There are likely to be lots of cross-over votes across the state that will vote for Obama and McCrory just as the Mayor has gotten in Charlotte for 7 straight elections (as Democrats and independents outnumber Republicans in Charlotte 3:1)