Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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JULY 20-26, 2016 UCW 21 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM When North Carolina Democrats Jim Hunt and Rufus Edmisten were running their races for U.S. Senate and governor in 1984, they kept as far away as they could from the Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale. Hunt and Edmisten co-chaired the state's delegation to the Democratic National Convention that summer, for example, but kept a low profile. Hunt declined an invitation to fill a prime speaking slot — held in San Francisco, as if the event's leftward tilt needed an extra shove — while Edmisten tried to stay out of every camera shot. Later, when Mondale made a campaign stop in Asheville, Hunt and Edmisten arranged to be elsewhere. Their opponents, Jesse Helms and Jim Martin respectively, did the opposite. They attached themselves firmly to the president who would go on to win 62 percent of the vote in the Tar Heel State. "If Ronald Reagan wins and Jim Martin wins, North Carolina wins," the latter told audiences. Sen. Helms was reelected with 52 percent. Martin won the governor's race with 54 percent. In North Carolina, presidential contests always coincide with gubernatorial races and usually with U.S. Senate races. In the 2016 cycle, which features the two most unpopular presidential nominees since polling began, there has been a great deal of speculation about how Democratic and Republican candidates for statewide office will respond to the situation. History offers some lessons here. But they must be interpreted carefully. Generally speaking, since North Carolina politics became truly competitive, Democrats have tended to out-perform their Presidential nominees while Republicans have tended to under- perform theirs. From 1972 to 2008, for example, the Democratic nominees for North Carolina governor averaged nearly 230,000 more votes than their party's presidential nominees did. Republican gubernatorial candidates got an average of 185,000 fewer votes than theirs. In percentage terms, Democratic vote shares for governor averaged 10 points higher than their Presidential shares, while the GOP gubernatorial average was eight points lower. The same kind of differential, although a bit weaker, was evident for U.S. Senate races in Presidential years: on average, Democrats outpolled their Presidential nominees by six points while Republicans fell short by three. However, these averages obscure important variations. Both Lauch Faircloth in 1992 and Jesse Helms in 1996 attracted more votes for Senate than the respective tops of their tickets (George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole) got in North Carolina. And in both Gov. Martin's successful 1988 reelection campaign and Jim Gardner's unsuccessful 1992 campaign to succeed him, their vote totals were fairly close to the GOP Presidential tally. The biggest outlier of all was just four years ago, when Pat McCrory was elected governor with 55 percent of the vote while Mitt Romney barely squeaked by Barack Obama in the state. McCrory got 170,000 more votes than Romney did in 2012. His opponent, Walter Dalton, got nearly 247,000 fewer votes than Obama. At this writing, the 2016 Presidential race appears to be tightly contested in North Carolina. Most recent polls have Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump, but not significantly. Burr currently leads his Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross, by an average of six points. McCrory and his Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, are tied. Unless the national conventions result in a big swing in Presidential preference here, my guess is that all these statewide candidates will choose to focus on their own races and decline to "nationalize" them through a large number of joint events or ad campaigns. They know that, although partisan voting has generally increased, quite a few North Carolinians continue to split their tickets, including in the past three presidential cycles. It's too risky for these candidates to strap themselves to someone else's mast and pray for good weather. On the other hand, Democrats have generally been the ones to gain from decoupling the state and national trends. Republicans have never won a race for U.S. Senate or governor in a year in which their presidential candidate did not win at least a slight plurality in North Carolina. Will 2016 be different? Candidates Go Their Own Way by JOHN HOOD Hilary Clinton JOHN HOOD, President of the John Locke Foundation. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. We're Gonna Need a Bigger Surfboard The Shallows (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS The Shallows (96 minutes) is the story of a poor, misunderstood shark quietly eating a whale when an entitled surfer girl having an identity crisis after the death of her mother invades the ocean. The horrid girl taunts the shark into attacking her and then gets a bunch of people killed because she didn't invest in a waterproof pouch for her phone. The human center of the story is Nancy (Blake Lively). Like Mary Poppins, she is practically perfect in every way. She is on her way to a beach so secret, none of the five people she asks will tell her the name of it. Yet her pregnant mother went there, and the guy with the jeep finds it without a problem and the two surfer guys are there and the beach doesn't seem so secret by the time the drunk guy wanders onto set and passes out. Yet, people keep refusing to tell her the name of the beach. Is it called Murder Beach? Or Nancy is Dead Beach? Sharkbait Beach? The film starts off on the wrong foot, by having Nancy start texting people in between butchering the Spanish language to demonstrate that she is a global citizen. Collett-Serra has done this to me before — if I remember correctly, approximately 30 minutes of Non-Stop was Liam Neeson texting in widescreen (with an additional 30 minutes devoted to trying to find dropped signals). It is even more irritating now, because the device is also used to fill in character details. We find out via text-position that the death of Nancy's mom has driven her to leave medical school. She is questioning her life choices and trying to figure out if she is going to roam the earth helping people, like Jules in Pulp Fiction. But first, surfing. Lots and lots of surfing. I wonder if the director accidently spliced in some of Lively's vacation footage? While surfing, she manages to end up beneath a whale carcass. That seems … careless. Wouldn't she have smelled it? While investigating the bloated corpse (Why? Why would anyone do that?) she upsets a nearby Great White, is attacked, spends a lot of time hitting her head on the coral beneath the waves, gets bitten and manages to pull herself on top of the whale. Obviously, that situation isn't sustainable. She sees a protruding rock, swims to it, and pulls herself up beside that seagull from The Little Mermaid. They sing a few lines of "Part of Your World." At least, I hoped they would. Instead, she surveys the damage to her leg and decides to use her necklace to sew the wounds shut, because that's like, Lesson One in medical school. After having a rest and assessing the hopelessness of her situation, Nancy considers the bird, still resting on the rock. She figures out it has a broken bone, and, like the real life Disney princess she is, fixes the wing and sets the bird afloat on the remnants of her surfboard. If I had been writing this movie, she would have strangled the bird to use for fishbait, shark distraction or dinner. Overall, I really need to stop trying to enjoy movies with Blake Lively. Her default expression is "coyly smug" and I don't think you are supposed to be rooting for the shark to devour her soft bits before swimming happily off to sea, never to be bothered by people again. Or maybe that's why director Jaume Collett- Serra cast her? So the great white shark who eats people is the real hero of the story. Now showing at Patriot 14 + IMAX. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. 910.484.6200. Admission $1.00 • Adult FREE with Paying Child • All Staff FREE