Smith concedes

Fair enuf DM, but newspapers had nothing to do with Smith's poor performance where the voters actually are -- Smith essentially conceded the entire Charlotte media market to McCrory -- and that market is huge. Knit it together up I-85 with the Triad, and you got a major pool of votes.

As we noted here, McCrory nuked Smith in STANLY -- not exactly Uptown Charlotte.

When Smith did make a foray into the QC, he stumbled and failed to connect with voters eager to hear how the dead-enders of the Jim Black Gang could be kicked from power in Raleigh.

This task now falls to McCrory. Take a look at the raw vote totals -- either he knee-caps Perdue with Beltline corruption and criminality or he loses by double digits.

JAT

Fred Smith had to be doing something right out there on the campaign trail because he carried somewhere close to two-thirds of the 100 counties of North Carolina, and these were primarily west and east of the Piedmont, where Pat McCrory ran strong.

Being from Charlotte originally, I know what an able and appealing candidate McCrory has been in running for mayor of Charlotte and governor of North Carolina. Indeed, in following press coverage of this GOP primnary for governor, I started out knowing more about Mayor McCrory than I did about Sen. Smith. So while both candidates are to be congratulated on well-run campaigns, I would suggest that while the metropolitan newspapers serving the largest cities and counties in the state have found a methodology for stressing why the rest of the state should heed what is going on in the home cities of these newspapers, they seem little interested in informing people in their local urban areas of some of the topics of conversation among folks out in the smaller cities and towns of Eastern North Carolina and Western North Carolina.

I noticed the same thing in news coverage and editorial commentary in the Democratic presidential primary particularly in regard to former President Bill Clinton's campaign forays into the Western Piedmont and certain Eastern counties: the pattern of commentary seemed to be more consternation than curiosity that Bill Clinton was going into those regions and counties, never mind the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton carried most of these local areas where her husband campaigned.

But like Pat McCrory in the GOP primary for governor, Sen. Barack Obama dominated the voting results in the Piedmont in the Democratic presidential primary, so their respective campaigns got major boosts toward victory lane.

Being a native of the state's largest city of Charlotte myself, I would be the last person to slight the importance of political debates and campaigns in the most populated counties of the state in such regions as the Triangle, the Triad and Charlotte. But the news media ought to pay more attention to the outlying areas of North Carolina as well--the cities and counties of Eastern and Western N.C. where Fred Smith rolled up impressive local victories in the Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday.

Who knows? Just maybe the good people of Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Charlotte could learn a thing or two by hearing the concerns of residents across the rest of North Carolina. Just because a candidate is running statewide from Johnston County doesn't mean that his or her issues platform ought to be given short shrift in the editorial boardrooms of metropolitan newspapers in the Piedmont.

Hats off to Fred Smith for running a strong campaign and perhaps setting some kind of record for number of N.C. counties carried without actually winning a statewide election. The McCrory campaign is certainly likely to take a serious look at this interesting GOP election primary map in preparing for the fall campaign.

David McKnight