PPP-NC - Burr with 41% approval

[Verily]

Neal is also gay, so I don't know why we're even discussing him in regards to this election.

[Verily]

Look, Josh, I know you’d really want it to be the case. And, in many ways, Jim Neal of the same breed of politician as the people who will become the first openly gay Senator and the first openly gay President. But sexual orientation is not race, and some bigotries are more widespread and more tolerated in popular culture than others. Even many of those who are racist are unwilling to admit it, but homophobia is still acceptable in the national public sphere, let alone in a state with a large conservative population. Neal may be very successful on the local level in Chapel Hill, and I wish him the best. But statewide ambitions for any gay politician in most of the country—not just North Carolina—are still at least a decade out of reach.

[Verily]

Oh my God. Wow.

Anyway, Neal is just a pipe dream. You may have been right on Obama winning NC, but an openly gay guy from Chapel Hill is not doing to win the nomination, much less beat Richard Burr in a general election in an off year where a popular Democrat is not heading the ticket. The only people that could vote for him would be the weirdos in Durham and Orange County, and even then he'd lose in a landslide. It just isn't going to happen. Electing a black and a gay guy are two different things.

Incidentally, two random rural counties in western North Carolina did vote for Neal in the 2008 primaries. I was never able to figure out why. Neal generally did surprisingly well in the Asheville area. (Neal is in blue, Hagan in red, Williams in green.)



https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2008&fips=37&f=1&off=3&elect=1

[Verily]

Sometimes in very conservative areas, and I'm not saying this happened in this case, the very few people who turn out for primaries are very liberal.  Like, Obama did extremely well in Utah, Wyoming, Alaska, etc.'s primaries.

Western North Carolina is not exactly the land of the ski-bunnies and environmental workers. Although the traditional vote there is Republican, unlike in most of the rural South.

Also, Alcon, Asheville is in Buncombe County, which borders both McDowell and Yancey, although a cursory glance suggests that the influence of Asheville doesn't extend beyond the Buncombe County line (so McDowell and Yancey are still mostly rural). According to Wikipedia, the census does not put either in the Asheville MSA.