Many voters in swing-state North Carolina are disengaged. Party activists hope to fire them up

OXFORD, N.C. (AP) — She opens the door wearing a gray tank top, Hello Kitty pajama pants and pink fuzzy slippers. With her 6-year-old son standing quietly beside her, she listens patiently as Liz Purvis begins discussing what’s at stake in the election this November.

The woman, Cynthia, tells Purvis she doesn’t watch the news or even know who the president is. When Purvis, the 31-year-old chair of the Democratic Party in Granville County, North Carolina, tells her that a White House rematch looms between Democratic President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Cynthia lets out a laugh, then an expletive.

Such is the state of the 2024 election, as seen at the ground level. In this rural county in one of the states expected to help decide the presidency, the nuts-and-bolts efforts of party activists to generate election enthusiasm are sometimes met with indifference and even disgust from people who could be positioned to play an outsize role in determining the nation’s course.

North Carolina voters also are deciding a groundbreaking and closely contested governor’s race. Democrat Josh Stein would be the state’s first Jewish governor while Republican Mark Robinson, who would become its first Black chief executive. Robinson, endorsed with gusto by Trump as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” has a history of controversial public statements regarded by critics as either homophobic or antisemitic. He has vigorously defended his past remarks.

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