President Joe Biden visited the Abbotts Creek Community Center in Raleigh on Thursday to tout his administration’s investments in North Carolina and announce new funding for high-speed broadband internet access across the state.
“Over the next three years, over 300,000 homes and businesses all across North Carolina will be connected to affordable high speed internet,” the president said in a speech to a crowd of over 150 invited guests, including donors and local politicians. “And today we announced another major step. We’re investing more than $82 million to connect 16,000 additional homes and businesses, bringing broadband all across the state of North Carolina,” Biden said in front of an “INVESTING IN AMERICA” backdrop.
“When jobs grow, everything grows,” he said, highlighting the manufacturing of fiber optic cable in Hickory.
Biden’s speech was part of a broader election year effort to convince voters that the “Bidenomics” numbers—record unemployment and slowing inflation—should make them excited about voting for him again. The visit came just days after Donald Trump’s clear victory in the Republican Iowa Caucuses and served as a brief mixer and rally for Triangle Democrats ahead of competitive local, gubernatorial, and presidential elections, all kicking off with a primary on March 5.
Though it will be an uphill fight, North Carolina Democrats think Biden could win the state this year. Partly because Trump only won by 1.3 percent in 2020, and partly because the same voters who picked Trump in 2016 and 2020 also used those ballots to elect Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
Biden’s path to victory in North Carolina—which has gone for the Republican in every recent election except 2008—follows U.S. 70 through the liberal college towns of the Triangle. Over the past few months, though, those liberal voters who danced in the streets after the 2020 election have taken to packing Triangle municipal council meetings to argue that Biden is funding a genocide in Gaza. Bidenomics doesn’t yet include an easy solution for lasting peace in the Middle East, and he didn’t bring up the issue on Thursday.
Cooper, who is term-limited by the state constitution, warmed up the crowd for Biden.
“This man did more in his first two years as president than most presidents could do in eight years,” Cooper said. “He supercharged our efforts with funding from the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure law. Now, instead of investing tens of millions of dollars, we’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars—soon to be billions of dollars—in high speed internet in North Carolina.”
In his speech, Biden linked himself to the iconic President Franklin D. Roosevelt (remembered for his New Deal revitalization after the Great Depression) by invoking the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which brought lights and power to rural America.
“It was determined that no American should be left behind no matter where they live, whether in a big city or a rural area. I made the same determination about our time, affordable high speed internet,” Biden said. (He later compared Trump to President Herbert Hoover, who is often blamed for mishandling the beginning of the Great Depression.)
“We’ve invested—and I know it’s going to sound like not much to you all but,”—Biden leaned into the microphone for emphasis—“$11 billion in North Carolina,” including a new rail line to connect Raleigh to Richmond and a replacement for the Alligator River Bridge.
The crowd politely oohed and ahhed.
The most enthusiastic viewer was the 26-year-old state Democratic Party Chair, Anderson Clayton, whose Southern twang rang through her “yeah!”s of approval from her front row seat.
“This is exciting shit,” she tells the INDY after Biden’s motorcade drove off to Cookout for a post-speech milkshake with the governor.
“I’ve worked on broadband for the last two years in my day job. And I am from a rural part of North Carolina that is going to benefit [from the investment]. There’s fiber cable coming right down [U.S.] 501 into Person County right now, because of money that Spectrum and other internet companies are getting from this,” Clayton says.
The crowd of community leaders was warm to Biden, but no one whooped and hollered as much as Clayton. Maybe the “Instrumental Light Jazz” Spotify playlist, pumped through the loudspeakers in the hours leading up to the event, was just too relaxing. Or maybe they were thrown off when Biden started the speech by searching the audience for Triangle U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington at the time. “I got it mixed up,” Biden said with a laugh.
That contrast made it easy to see how Clayton won her job.
“Man, fuck, hand me that microphone. You know what I mean? Like, I’ll make them feel it real quick for you, Joe Biden,” Clayton says.
Durham City Council’s Mark-Anthony Middleton was also in the front row. He says he hopes federal money can help repair infrastructure like bridges, as well as solve some safety problems in the Bull City.
“We need more funding to help bolster our first responders’ capabilities,” he says, referring to staffing shortages at Durham’s 911 call center. “I thank [the Biden administration] and then ask them to keep that pipeline prime.”
Middleton, like many Triangle officials at the event, has been hearing from constituents who are angry about Biden’s support for Israel’s military. In Raleigh especially, the city council’s recent public comment sessions have been swarmed by residents urging the council to condemn the war in Gaza. Last year, Carrboro’s council was the first to call on Biden to support a ceasefire.
Ahead of the Thursday event, groups including Jewish Voice for Peace sent out a press release titled “Genocide Joe is Not Welcome in the Triangle,” referring to the more than 24,000 people killed in Gaza since Israel began its retaliation to the October 7 Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. Hamas still holds over 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza, and South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
“[Biden] is aiding a genocidal project by Israel,” the release stated. They couldn’t get inside the secret service perimeter, but protesters gathered about a mile away and began walking up Durant Road toward the venue after the president left.
But Middleton says most Durhamites he talks to are more worried about local issues like “potholes, 911 responsiveness, the state of our hospitals and schools.”
“The mayor and I just recently have been meeting with community leaders to talk about Durham’s response to that issue,” he says. “But the overwhelming majority of conversations I have are about the eastern part of Durham, rather than the [Middle East].”
Clayton says she’s glad that activists are “doing their job” by pushing the Biden administration because “people are dying right now who do not deserve to.” And she hopes that statewide issues and high-quality candidates will help unify Triangle liberals at the polls in November.
“We have a state legislature that has restricted abortion rights, that has come for public schools, that is coming for LGBTQ rights. It’s not just about the top of the ticket. It is also about every other election that we have,” Clayton says. “We’ve got so many good local candidates running for office.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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