How Trump Won One of America’s Most Diverse Counties — By a Lot

PROSPECT, N.C.—Jarrod Lowery, a former Marine, a current member of the Lumbee Tribal Council and an up-and-coming local Republican activist and operator in this age-old Democratic stronghold, steered his white Chevy Silverado past fallow fields of soybeans and corn, past silos and cow crossings, past doublewide trailers and brick-block homes on multigenerational family plots, past the sign describing the area as “the cradle of Indian prosperity”—and past the lawns, telephone poles and above-ground pools boasting posters, banners and flags exhibiting practically lockstep support for Donald Trump.

“This,” said the affable, voluble Lowery, 32, giving me a recent tour, “is the heart.”

It’s the heart of the Native American community that lives here in the low-lying, often forgotten inland portion of North Carolina’s southeastern bulge—the Lumbee, the largest tribe in the state, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River. And it’s the heart, too, of the reason Trump won Robeson County for the second straight election—and this time not by a little, but by a lot.

Down from the volunteer fire department, across from Prospect United Methodist Church, Lowery pointed to Prospect School, which serves as Precinct 35—his precinct—which voted for Trump in 2016 at an eye-popping clip of 67 percent and then upped that last month to a yet more astonishing 81. Trump’s performance in more than a dozen Lumbee-rich precincts that had similarly striking jumps in votes helped him hold on to this swing state even as he suffered notable slippage in the suburbs and lost by yawning margins in the cities. Over the past four-plus years, Robeson County attracted its fair share of attention as a gauge of rural America’s Trump-torqued shifting political allegiances from Democrat to Republican, but last month’s results were remarkable in ways that haven’t been altogether appreciated for the significance they could hold for the future of both parties.

There’s nowhere, not in this state, maybe not in any other state, quite like this. By land mass, Robeson’s the largest county in North Carolina, only a tad smaller than the whole of Rhode Island. It is one of this state’s poorest counties, and one of its least educated. Its population of some 130,000 people is also, though, one of the most broadly diverse in the nation—42.3 percent American Indian, 30.6 percent white, 23.6 percent black, with a growing Hispanic presence as well. “I always tell people it’s unique,” as Donnie Douglas, who was the editor of the Robesonian newspaper for almost a quarter-century, put it when we talked last week. “And I know what unique means.”

It’s this uniqueness, however, that makes Robeson County not so much an outlier as a barometer. For all the headaches that Trump’s overall manner and refusal to concede pose for Republicans and those candidates eyeing House, Senate or presidential bids, he has crafted a sort of template for how the GOP might prevail even without him. Because as Democrats made marked gains with an increasingly multiracial mix of voters in and around the most metropolitan areas, Trump did a version of the same out in the hinterlands—defying the conventional wisdom that rural America is a sprawling demographic dead end of a steadily dwindling swath of less-educated white voters. On the contrary, Trump found ways to juice his support in these places, drawing support from pools of people previously considered all but unreachable for Republicans.

Next to nowhere was this more vividly on display than in Robeson County, where Trump retained the vast majority of the white vote, improved his performance in predominantly Black precincts and all-out romped in Lumbee hotbeds. Trump and his campaign targeted voters regardless of their racial differences with his rural-resonant messages of social conservatism—pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military—and anti-NAFTA broadsides that are catnip for an electorate that blames free trade agreements and globalization for shuttered factories and a sinking standard of living. The campaign also added to the equation a hyperspecific and transactional component: very publicly backing the federal recognition the Lumbee have been seeking since the 1800s. Finally, Trump and his most prominent surrogates kept showing up, a persistence that crested with Trump’s rally in the county seat a week and a half before the election—something no sitting president had ever done here.

The result of those efforts supercharged a trend that area pols say has been building in less conspicuous fashion for going on 20 years. Trump increased his support here in both total votes and percentage more than in any of the other 99 counties in North Carolina. Joe Biden in Robeson actually got four more votes than Hillary Clinton did four years back. But Trump? He got 7,044 more votes than he did in 2016. “It’s one of the more amazing things I’ve seen,” said Tom Eamon, a longtime political scientist at East Carolina University and the author of a book on the political history of the state. And the linchpin was the Lumbee.

“The Lumbee population is now performing electorally like non-college rural white voters,” Morgan Jackson, one of the state’s top Democratic consultants, told me. “And you see this happening in a lot of rural white communities where there are large percentages of minority population.”

“It’s a microcosm of what’s happening across the United States and rural America,” said Democrat Joshua Malcolm, the chief judge on the Lumbee Supreme Court and a former chair of the state board of elections.

“And I think maybe we’re seeing some evidence that the political values that go along with being rural maybe under Trump start to matter somewhat more than the racial, ethnic factors,” North Carolina State University political scientist Steve Greene explained.

“Making inroads with minority voters, maybe especially in non-urban areas,” Greene added, “might be the formula.” It’s true for Republicans. It’s true, too, for Democrats—forced to face indications from Texas to Florida to here that racial and ethnic blocks are acting less like dependable, predictable monoliths, the identity politics undergirding their approach evincing cracks and strain.

“I do think that there is a moving beyond race,” said Republican Dan Bishop, who represents Robeson in Congress. “I think you’ll continue to see places like Robeson County be more reliable Republican places, and they’ll be a counterbalance to what you may see in more urban areas.”

The Lumbee? “We are Christians, we’re very socially conservative, but we’re also working class,” Lowery told me.

“I think,” Pat McCrory, the GOP governor of North Carolina from 2013 to 2017, said when we talked this week, “the Republican Party can take ad …”—he caught himself—“can make full use of the Democrats ignoring this important constituency.”

“A lot of Democrats have taken the Lumbee vote for granted,” Dan McCready, a Democrat who didn’t fall into that trap and almost swung the state’s 9th Congressional District because of it, told me. “Now, just like white rural voters are leaving the Democratic Party, many Lumbee voters are doing so, too. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Perhaps it won’t stay that way. For now, though, it is that way. And it’s viscerally visible. Driving out of Prospect, headed back toward Pembroke, the county’s Lumbee business hub, Lowery noted the consistent display, more than a month after Election Day, of Trump and Trump-adjacent paraphernalia—a Blue Lives Matter flag, a Trump train flag, signs saying Christians for Trump.

I marveled at the volume.

Lowery all but shrugged.

“Before the election, it was a lot more,” he said. “There was Trump stuff everywhere.”

Jarrod Lowery’s first political memory, and this is something I heard repeatedly from Republicans in Robeson County, Lumbee or otherwise, is hearing as a boy his grandparents talking about how they’d never, ever vote for a Republican. “My grandfather told me that if his dad was a Republican, he wouldn’t vote for him,” he told me. “Republicans are rich and you got to be rich to be a Republican, and if you were poor, you’re a Democrat, because Democrats care about the poor—that was the whole mindset.”

Lowery’s second real political memory, though, is just as powerful. He was 12. It was November 7, 2000, and his mother had him tag along when she went to vote. She whispered to him that she was going to go with all the Democrats … except for president. She was voting for George W. Bush. The Republican. The reason? “The values,” Lowery told me in Pembroke at Fuller’s Barbecue as we sat in a back booth and munched on a lunch of collard greens, fried fatback and Lumbee-style, saucer-sized slabs of cornbread. Bush was against abortion. Bush was a born-again Christian. That year, Bush won by double digits in North Carolina; in Robeson County, he got a little more than 39 percent of the vote.

The next year, seven years after the passage of the North American Freed Trade Agreeent, Lowery’s mother lost her job as a line worker making medical supplies at a plant in Laurinburg in neighboring Scotland County. Also in 2001, in Robeson, the Converse shoe factory went dark, too, putting hundreds of employees out of work—at the forefront of a slew of such closures around the county and the wider region at the time that led to reduced wages, benefits and economic options. Median per capita income in the county is now less than $19,000 a year. “Losing her job kind of shattered the dreams that she had for her family,” Lowery told me. “She was never able to recover that income.”

“You didn’t have to have a college education, and you could do very well,” said local GOP mover and shaker Bo Biggs, recalling the pre-NAFTA reality in Robeson. And now? “It’s gone.”

“When I came to this campus,” said Emily Neff-Sharum, who’s taught political science at the University of North Carolina Pembroke for more than a decade, “I learned very quickly that NAFTA was a dirty word around here.”

In 2004, even as Robeson hemorrhaged thousands more manufacturing jobs, Democrats on account of some combination of inertia and familiarity with candidates and representatives continued to win and win big, from local officials to gubernatorial hopefuls to Blue Dog Dem Mike McIntyre in Congress. But that steady defection signified by Lowery’s mother’s vote in 2000 continued. Bush, at the top of the Republican ticket, that year improved his performance in the county to 47 percent and easily won the state.

In retrospect, Barack Obama’s historic election as president in 2008 and his reelection in 2012 papered over swelling signs of a profound political rejiggering—in North Carolina and in Robeson County in particular. In 2010, for the first time in more than a century, Republicans took control of the state Legislature up in Raleigh. Down here by the South Carolina border, in the sandhills on the banks of the blackwater Lumber River, the margins in more races, too, suggested change was afoot.

Richard Burr had gotten 38 percent of the vote in Robeson when he was elected to the Senate in 2004. Six years later he got 46 percent. Pat McCrory, partly because of a Lumbee English teacher he had had in high school near Greensboro, he told me, prioritized the county in his 2008 run for governor. He got 28 percent of the vote in Robeson that year and lost. In 2012, when he ran again, he got 38 percent in Robeson—and won. Most residual stigma of voting Republican receded, and a burgeoning base of politically engaged, young Lumbee GOP strivers did their part. “We raised, I don’t know, $75,000 at my home,” Pembroke insurance agent Jarette Sampson told me, “for a Republican governor candidate than went on to win”—at which point McCrory hired a regional field director who had just graduated with a degree in political science from UNCP: Jarrod Lowery.

Then came 2016. Thanks to his surging numbers from Lumbee precincts, Trump did something no Republican presidential candidate had done in Robeson County since Richard Nixon did it in 1972. With just shy of 51 percent of the vote, Trump won here.

“The reason Robeson County voted Republican is the Native American population voted Republican,” Lowery told Daniel Allott, who wrote a book called On the Road in Trump’s America—in which Allott pegged Robeson as one of the “nine counties that were crucial to understanding the 2016 election.” Those on the other side of the divide obviously couldn’t help but notice as well. John McNeill, the former head of the county Democratic Party, recalled when we talked last week being at the polls in 2016 and running into a Lumbee man who told him he had never voted. But he was voting now. “I’m here,” McNeill remembered the man saying, “because of Trump.” The trend toward red, though, didn’t end with Trump. Most notably, Danny Britt, a Lumberton attorney and a JAG Corps vet, became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win the area’s state Senate seat.

In 2018, in the fraud-marred race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, which stretches from the edge of Charlotte east and includes all of Robeson, Dan McCready overperformed as a Democrat—winning the county with 56.4 percent of the vote. In the special election not quite a year later, he still won the county—this time, though, with barely more than 50 percent.

“The biggest thing is to actually show up,” McCready told me this week. “The first thing to understand about Robeson County and eastern North Carolina more broadly is, I don’t think there’s any place in the country where politicians have left people behind as much as they have there. Folks are struggling with not just health care costs, schools, jobs, many of which were lost because of NAFTA and bad trade deals—they’re not getting the disaster relief that they were promised by politicians in both Washington and Raleigh. And then, of course, the Lumbee tribe has faced one of the greatest injustices in our entire country, which is a lack of full federal recognition.”

Even so, McCready lost in 2019 to Dan Bishop, and one reason was a sag in support from the Lumbee. “The Lumbee are culturally conservative, church-going and entrepreneurial. And more and more of us are distressed by the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party,” Lowery wrote in an op-ed in the wake of the results. He cited his own precinct, the 35th, where McCready’s share of the vote dropped from 53 percent to 39—a peek at a hardening of support in the community for Trump and evidence that social-issues-centered messaging painting all Democrats as radicals was working.

It was not lost on the Trump 2020 operation.

All the way back in early 2017, Paul Shumaker, one of the state’s top Republican consultants, told me, Trump’s aides were “consumed”—Shumaker’s word—with the chance they saw to expand their vote in Robeson County. “The Trump White House was more engaged on North Carolina, their political operations, than any point in time, of any president I’d worked with, any Republican president I had worked with, in the past,” said Shumaker, who has been working in politics in the state since Ronald Reagan was president. “They had a political strategy on the reelect to improve their vote performance in those outlying areas.” The campaign dispatched some of its most prominent surrogates—Donald Trump Jr., North Carolina-born and bred Lara Trump—not just to close-but-not-quite cities like Wilmington and Fayetteville but to Robeson proper.

They weren’t the only ones who sniffed opportunity. The Lumbees, by most accounts politically savvy and canny, responded in kind.

“There was many, many conversations about getting the president to come to Robeson County,” Lowery told me.

“We’d been working on it a year, probably a year, really trying to get him,” Sampson said. “We were trying to get him here in 2019, but it just never lined up right. And then when we got in that tight election”—polls in the state heading toward Election Day almost always showed Trump and Biden tangled in a toss-up—“then it became about the numbers, and it made it a little easier. But by that time, we’d make relationships with a lot of people around his organization.”

“I personally had a hand in getting the president to come down here,” Lowery said, describing a conversation he had with Billy Kirkland, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. “I was, like, ‘Look, you have an opportunity here.’ I said, ‘Lumbee people are voting more Republican anyway, but you need those numbers.’ I told him, I said, ‘Look, you could win by 1,700, or you could win by 8,000. It’s your choice.’”

Knowing their clout and leveraging it, Lowery, Sampson and other Lumbees lobbied for more than merely a rally. Trump wasn’t the first politician to come out for federal recognition for the tribe—far from it. Republican senators from the state have been supportive for years. So have House members from both parties who represent Robeson and areas around it. The House sponsor of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina Recognition Act is a Democrat—G.K. Butterfield from the state’s 1st Congressional District. Trump wasn’t even the first 2020 presidential candidate to come out for it—Biden had done it two weeks earlier. But Trump did it the most publicly.

“The Lumbee tribe has been fighting for federal recognition for more than a century,” the president said October 21 at a rally in Gastonia, west of Charlotte. “When I am reelected I will work with Congress,” he said, “on the Lumbee Recognition Act, and we’ll get it done.”

Three days later Trump was in Lumberton, and Lowery was an opening-act speaker at the rally at the county fairgrounds. “They said, ‘Sir, you have to be here with the Lumbee tribe,’” Trump said. “I said, ‘Explain to me about the Lumbee tribe.’” He reiterated his pledge: “When I’m reelected …” The heavily Lumbee crowd clapped, cheered and banged on drums.

“Off the charts,” McNeill, the former county Democratic boss, said when I asked what the rally did to drive up the Trump vote in Robeson.

“He already had the Native American vote,” said Mark Locklear, a self-employed investigator, precinct captain who lives in Prospect, and pro-gun, pro-life Democrat who voted for Trump in 2016 (but not in 2020 due to his bullying behavior and response to the pandemic). “But what he may have done, with coming here and announcing his support for the federal recognition, is bring some voters off the couch.”

At Fuller’s restaurant, as we polished off cups of banana pudding, Lowery was nearly giddy recounting the rallies. “We were like, ‘Oh, wow,’” he said. “The president just endorsed us. The first sitting president to actually say it.”

What Trump did in Robeson County worked.

Lowery pulled over on a side street in Pembroke and opened his laptop, called up the state board of elections’ website, drilled down to Robeson County and started scanning through precincts—the statistical specifics of the political story here this year unfolding on his screen.

In the predominantly Black precincts, almost without exception, turnout was up significantly, so Biden got more votes than Clinton did in 2016, but so, too, did Trump get more votes than he had four years back. Biden won these precincts, obviously, and handily—but not by as much as Clinton. Trump upped his shares. “Anecdotally, we have a lot of African American friends who say, ‘I voted for Trump,’” Phillip Stephens, chair of the Robeson County Republican Party, told me. “I got a text from one guy that said, ‘We can’t let the socialists win.’”

In the predominantly Lumbee areas, meanwhile, Trump’s showing shot up manifestly more: Precincts in which four years ago he got percentages in the 40s spiked into the 50s, the 50s became 60s, and the 60s—into the 70s.

All of it contributed to that better-than-7,000-vote increase—with his projection to Kirkland, Lowery wasn’t too far off—an aggregate picture revealing not flipped votes so much as new votes, a concentrated little glimpse at the possibility of an altered, broadened, more diverse winning GOP coalition.

What does or might it mean in 2022, ’24 and beyond? “If the next Republican can hold the minority margins that Trump did,” Lowery said, “Democrats are in for a bad night, a bad, long night.”

Because going into 2020, in this growing and changing but still quite rural state, Democrats in their basic calculations believed that if they ran up the score in the cities, especially in Charlotte and Raleigh, and whittled away traditional Republican support in more affluent, educated suburbs, they would win. That Biden would win. That Cal Cunningham would win a seat in the Senate. The Democrats accomplished those goals in the cities and suburbs—and still lost those key races. The math didn’t pan out. It was close—but they lost nonetheless. And it was because Robeson and counties like it and around it (Anson, Richmond, Scotland, Bladen, Sampson, Columbus) and in the northeastern section of the state, too, increased their support for Trump.

It amounts to a rather stunning rebuke of Democratic messaging and strategy. “You have a county that’s 70 percent minority,” said Douglas, the former editor of the Robesonian, “that voted for a guy who is perceived by half the country as being a racist.”

Urban America is more populous and more diverse, of course, than rural America, and “rural America” comes in many variations. Still, roughly one in five people who lives in America lives in a rural area, and roughly one in five people who live in a rural area is not white. And votes are up for grabs.

“The Democratic Party has left behind a lot of rural America, and that includes minority rural America,” said Sarah Treul, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “And if the party really wants to be a big tent party, it’s going to have to figure out a way to reconcile with the progressive left—but probably, more importantly, realize the progressive left is not a majority winning coalition. And that’s particularly true in the South.”

Here in this slice of the South, up and down the ballot in Robeson County, Republicans not named Trump won, too. Thom Tillis beat Cunningham with nearly 55 percent of the vote. Bishop was reelected with 58 percent of the vote. Britt was reelected to the state Senate with 63 percent of the vote. Roger Oxendine, a Democrat who had been a county commissioner since 2006, lost unexpectedly. Only one Democratic commissioner who had a contested race was reelected—Tom Taylor … who’s been outspoken about voting for Trump. McNeill, the former Democratic Party chairman, told me he heard from a friend about what Taylor had heard from voters on Election Day: “Tom, I’m voting for you this time. But if you don’t have an ‘R’ after your name next time, I’m not.”

“As I tell my students in political parties and politics class,” said Eamon, the ECU political scientist who wrote the book on North Carolina politics, “we don’t know that an election is a realigning election for the country or for just a part of the population until a while after the realignment has taken place. Because by its very nature, that’s what realignments are—they are changes for the longer term, like 1932, ’36, or in some respects 1968. And that’s something we just have to wait and see. Is it possible? And could that be a possible route for the Republicans? I do think it’s possible.”

“It’s not a passing fad,” Bishop said. “It’s not about Trumpism.”

The Robeson-specific X factor, of course, is Lumbee federal recognition.

“We’ve been abandoned by different administrations,” said Harvey Godwin, the tribal chairman. “But it has come down to this, after 133 years, our federal recognition bill is pending, and it has the best chance—it’s in the best position that it’s ever been.” The House passed it last month. But it needs to get through the Senate before it can be sent to the White House. “President Trump did promise,” Godwin said, “that he would sign the bill, so we’ll see.”

“He came here to the county promising federal recognition to the Lumbee tribe. They ate it up,” Pearlean Revels, chair of the county Democratic Party and a Lumbee. “They believed everything that came out of this man’s mouth. Everything. They worshipped him.”

“He gave them all this hope,” said Wixie Stephens, another Democrat and a Black, just-elected county commissioner. “He don’t care about paying people back.”

In other places, Trump has made promises he hasn’t kept—to coal miners in West Virginia, autoworkers in Ohio, for example. It’s worth pointing out, though, that he won both those states again last month.

The Lumbees insist they are not naïve about the nature of campaign pit-stop promises. But Lowery sat in his truck, parked catty-corner to a Family Dollar on 3rd Street in Pembroke, and plainly stated his expectation: “Our people came out and did what we were supposed to do—we need you to do what you’re supposed to do.”

And if Trump and the Republican Senate don’t?

“I think that it will be a hamper on Republicans getting some of the Lumbee vote.” Not just for president in 2024, he said—for the open Senate seat, too, here in 2022. Others in the county, and other Lumbees, are skeptical that would stem the GOP tide here. “I don’t think that it will really matter,” said Democrat Jim Hunt, a member of the tribal council, “because the Republicans that are supporting it now, like Dan Bishop, for instance, will continue to support it. They’ll still continue to come to the county because they are riding a wave now of popularity.”

But if it does get through the Senate? If Trump does sign it?

Lowery closed his laptop and looked over his steering wheel.

“They’re going to rename 3rd Street.”

“Donald J. Trump Avenue?” I asked.

“That’s the way,” he said, “our people are going to feel.”