00:00:09
Speaker 1: It's 5.05 and welcome in to a Friday edition of the Carolina Journal NewsHour on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
00:00:19
Speaker 2: I'm Nick Craig. Good morning to you. We are less than.
00:00:22
Speaker 1: 50 days away from Election Day here across the state of North Carolina. We've been covering a lot of detail over the last couple of weeks here on the Carolina Journal NewsHour and over on our website, carolinajournal.com, is a plethora of races going on. across North Carolina begin the process of materializing now that we are past the Labor Day weekend. We've got a brand new Carolina Journal poll out today that we're going to walk through the details of. Some very interesting numbers in this. To help us through that, it's my pleasure to welcome the brand new editor-in-chief of CarolinaJournal.com, David Larson, to the Carolina Journal NewsHour this morning. All right, David, we start these polls off at the top and kind of work our way down. Let's take a look at the Trump job approval and the direction of the country.
00:01:05
Speaker 2: We talked about this last month. Things are pretty much the same.
00:01:08
Speaker 1: People are not very optimistic about the direction of the country and the president's current disapproval rating.
00:01:14
Speaker 3: It's 57.1%. Ouch.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: Yes, it looks pretty similar on the Trump job approval as it did last time, which was in August. Slightly worse, actually, on the disapproved, not by much, by half a percent or so. And that strongly disapproved still being above 50 percent, 51 percent strongly.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: That's that's a tough number to.
00:01:40
Speaker 4: Overcome, I guess, on coattails and just the general feeling for his party often in that situation.
00:01:48
Speaker 3: Uh midterms of the second.
00:01:49
Speaker 4: Term the president's party will will suffer as it is and and maybe lose some seats so that that will probably come to bear a little bit based on that disapproval you see also the as you said the right direction wrong track numbers still sliding a little bit in terms of um those who think it's we're you know going the right direction was 34 percent last time now it's closer to 33 percent and wrong track was more like a little under 61, and now it's about over 61. So not too much movement, but none of it's in a good direction necessarily for Republicans.
00:02:23
Speaker 1: Let me ask you a little bit about that. President Donald Trump obviously is around and about. We saw him here in North Carolina this week stumping for Michael Watley.
00:02:32
Speaker 2: But David, his name is not actually.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: On the ballot, even though he's been telling people in one of his new lines is pretend that I'm on the ballot. I guess some of these numbers would indicate that maybe he shouldn't be telling people to pretend that he is on the ballot because these numbers are just not indicative of a president that is popular at this point in time.
00:02:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the numbers have been slipping over time. Like you see back in March, it was, you know, 53 and a half, 54% disapprove and only 46.8% was the strongest approve. So those are numbers you could kind of work with. And also what I noticed back then too was, There was a stronger, we'll get into this with some of the later numbers, but there was a stronger divergence between the way people thought about President Trump and maybe how they thought about generic Republicans. But I see that as sort of fading at this point and there being anything Republican and anything Trump is sort of in the same item in people's minds where even not that long ago and a couple of months ago in our polls, We would see, you know, the MAGA brand was really starting to struggle. But the Republican brand, when you ask about generic ballot and things of that nature, you know, we'll talk about those numbers in a bit. But I do think those are starting to converge. And it's Trump's party, even if he's not at the top of the ballot.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, because this is kind of interesting for us, our friends over at the Carolina Journal, many of our audience that follows this stuff day in and day out. David, the reality is the vast majority of North Carolinians do not. You think some of these stronger opinions start coming up when we get closer to an election cycle? I mean, we talked about what was going on back in March. We saw the primary turnout was abysmal as usual. But as we approach the general and get closer to that election, it seems like more and more people get engaged and maybe start forming opinions on things that they haven't thought about. And in some cases, maybe a year or so since the last time they voted in a general election.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: And that's fair. I mean, we are a political junkie.
00:04:35
Speaker 4: So to us, we're, we're analyzing all these numbers and assuming everybody else, there's gotta be a reason that this thing moves a little bit that way or, but a lot of times, you know, people aren't really as, uh, watching, watching the political.
00:04:48
Speaker 3: Winds as we are. Um, so, you know, that's fair. Like you look at, um, the way the.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: Undecided voters or which politicians people have heard of. You know, there's a lot of, I mean, you know, when you look at legislative leaders that we will hear their names every day, you ask every day, North Carolina voters, what they think about, you know, Phil Berger. And they, a lot of them, I mean, I think, I'm trying to remember what the numbers were, but it was a vast majority aren't even familiar with that name, you know, Phil Berger.
00:05:23
Speaker 3: And most people, they're not familiar with their mayor.
00:05:26
Speaker 4: It's just there's so much competing noise now that it's not like you get the local paper, you read about what your mayor is doing. And you read about the state legislature. People are focusing on international things. They're focused on all kinds of entertainment. And as you said, maybe they're not quite paying attention yet until it seems like, oh, you know what, I should. Time's getting near. Maybe I should start really digging into who these candidates are.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll see that as early voting kicks off in less than a month here across North Carolina. Let's move to North Carolina. We just talked a little bit about President Donald Trump. For Governor Josh Stein, his approval rating rebounding a little bit. We saw a low of 47.2% in August. He's now back up to 49.4% in terms of what voters seem to think of him. David, he's on the positive trend.
00:06:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's had interesting numbers in part because his election was an unusual one in that he had a just blowout election over Mark Robinson.
00:06:26
Speaker 3: And so there was.
00:06:28
Speaker 4: There was a lot of Republicans, were a lot of Republicans that were, it looks like for a while, really giving him a shot because they might have voted for him and they wanted to.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: Validate that in their minds probably.
00:06:41
Speaker 4: But that number started slipping, as you noted, for a while that, you know, as he starts governing and they remember, you know, I am a Republican and I don't typically vote. have approval for the Democrat governors, but maybe that hit its floor. And similar thing with Cooper, he always had that just right around 50% sort of numbers. So I think he's playing a similar game plan. He might actually be playing it a little bit more conciliatory even to Republicans. And Cooper would do a lot more vetoes and a lot more harsh rhetoric. Seems like Stein's trying to play that You know, he'll likely govern similarly to the left, like Cooper did, but at least in his messaging and his, you know, how he portrays himself to the public, he seems like he's going for moderate, nothing too crazy. And so maybe we won't see anything drastic like a drop down in his numbers for a while.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: 49.4% said they approve of the governor's job. 32.9% say they disapprove. We'll be keeping an eye on that in our polls that will follow in the months ahead. Let's move over to some of these generic legislative ballots and maybe explain a little bit. while we go through this process, there's way too many lawmakers here in North Carolina. As David just noted a couple of minutes ago, the vast majority of people have no idea who their lawmaker is. So we asked the question, if the 2026 general election were held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democrat candidate in the North Carolina state legislature? 49.5% David said they'd support the Democrat compared to 41.3 that would support the Republican. This is a pretty important number as a Republicans have held majorities in both chambers over the last 15 years.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: Maybe we see a crack this year?
00:08:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does seem like so.
00:08:32
Speaker 4: The numbers have been moving pretty steadily from, you know, Democrats had 45 percent, then it was 47 and a half, 48, now 49 and a half. So they have an eight point lead, 8.2 percent over Republicans. And I would say that, you know, there are there's 28 races. Andy Jackson over the Civitas Center here at John Locke Foundation. He looks into all these numbers, analyzes the districts. He says there's 28 races that are most competitive, but they're competitive. The reason it's kind of condensed into those specific races out of 170 races is the maps are pretty well laid out where Republicans, even if they are down a bit, I don't think they're going to see huge losses that will take away the majorities. But, you know, they might move a bit below an area where they'll be able to override vetoes, let's say.
00:09:25
Speaker 3: So that's more of what's probable if they're down eight points going into it.
00:09:31
Speaker 4: And a lot of those races are in Wake County and Mecklenburg County, a lot of these races that are more competitive. So there's a lot of people moving into these areas that are from more cosmopolitan areas from around the.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: Country and maybe are going to be leaning more towards the Democrats.
00:09:48
Speaker 4: So I do think, you know, if these numbers stay, it will probably be an advantage to the Democrats.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: But with the maps, I wouldn't say anything overly drastic is going to happen.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: We'll, of course, be keeping a close eye on the legislature as well as we get closer to November. We will dive into details on the all-important U.S. Senate race here in North Carolina coming up. You're listening to the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: It's 520.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT. We are joined this morning by David Larson, the brand new editor-in-chief of CarolinaJournal.com, going through details of our September Carolina Journal poll.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: Here in North Carolina, a major United States Senate race.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: I mentioned a little while ago the president here in North Carolina this week in Gastonia, stumping for Michael Watley, the Republican Senate candidate. He's He is battling against the former eight year governor before that attorney general, before that member of the North Carolina general assembly in Roy Cooper. These are some pitiful numbers for Michael Watley. David, he is now down 15.1% compared to Roy Cooper, 49.2 for Cooper, 34.1 for Watley.
00:11:00
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:11:00
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:11:01
Speaker 2: 15 points, 15.1 points.
00:11:01
Speaker 4: Um, The trend from March 2026 until now has been just a widening. I know there's other polls that have shown things a bit closer. Ours has just gone from.
00:11:22
Speaker 3: 8 points to 11 to 12.5.
00:11:23
Speaker 4: Now to 15.1. So it's over time. This is the first one where we've added Shannon Bray, the Libertarian candidate, and also Michael Dublin, the Green Party.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: So that changed things a bit.
00:11:40
Speaker 4: It actually brought Roy Cooper's numbers down from 51.5 to 49.2. But it also brought Whatley's numbers down about five points. So a loss of two for Cooper, but a loss of five for Whatley as we added in those other candidates.
00:11:57
Speaker 3: And it's not good.
00:11:59
Speaker 4: We can also talk about the question right above that we asked about Michael Watley and Roy Cooper in terms of what voters think about them, not whether they're going to vote for them or whatever.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: But when you hear about Michael Watley, what are your opinions?
00:12:16
Speaker 4: And I think this goes to the heart of maybe what What the issue is for him is he was fairly unknown comparatively. Roy Cooper has this will be his seventh statewide election. Cooper won six for his attorney general and two as governor for governor. And Roy Cooper, I mean, Michael Wiley, this will be his first statewide race, first really.
00:12:37
Speaker 3: Race of any kind.
00:12:38
Speaker 4: Kind of outside of, you know, party selections and people you had the never heard of numbers for Michael Watley are at 18 percent and no opinion or 13 percent. So those are kind of the people who have a question mark in their heads about him. So that's that's 32 percent of people and 32 percent of people still are thinking, you know, who exactly is this? And that's higher than his favorable rating, which is 26 percent. So you have more people who are not sure who he is than who are favorable to him. And maybe more painful than that is the unfavorable number is 42%.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: So there's quite a few more people.
00:13:18
Speaker 4: It's almost the same as for Cooper, but Cooper has a higher favorable than he does his unfavorable. So he has 47% favorable, 43% unfavorable. Um, and only 2% of people have never heard of Roy Cooper. So that for a, um, You know, a statewide candidate running for state elections, that's actually a very, very low number, as we talked about earlier, because people don't know leaders of the Senate and the House and all that in states that have only 2% of people say, I don't know who Roy Cooper is. He's very well known at this point, you know, running on statewide ballot. But yeah, that's... Wally is struggling. According to our numbers, I know there's others that say, oh, it might be getting closer.
00:14:05
Speaker 3: But who knows with the anomalous number, maybe it'll end up being them or us.
00:14:09
Speaker 4: But there's kind of a range of polling numbers between, say, seven. And I guess we're probably the widest gap I've seen. So it's not looking good if these are the real numbers.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Let me ask you, you were talking about the favorable, unfavorable, and there's no question about it with Michael Wally having never run a statewide campaign before that the vast majority of people don't know who he is. But I found the unfavorable very interesting. You mentioned Roy Cooper's unfavorability in our poll. is at 43.1%, but practically everybody knows who he is, so they have a strong opinion one way or the other. We go to Michael Watley, his unfavorable is almost exactly the same, David, at 42.0, yet you still have more than 30% of people that don't know.
00:14:52
Speaker 3: Who he is.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: That seems odd.
00:14:54
Speaker 1: I wouldn't expect to see an unfavorable number so high on a relatively unknown candidate in comparison to the former eight-year governor.
00:15:03
Speaker 4: I think Cooper's been able to run, you know, his ads and his campaign. He's fairly well defined and he knows his image at the moment. You know, a lot of people approve of him more than not. So he's been able to focus a lot of his advertising on defining, you know, if there isn't a name ID in people's minds, you know, people talk about campaigns, positive name ID. If there really isn't any name ID, positive or negative, he's been able to spend a lot of his campaign energy in defining Michael Watley negatively.
00:15:35
Speaker 3: And so I think those numbers show that to.
00:15:38
Speaker 4: The degree that he's doing that, it might be showing some success. And also, you know, if people on the Democrat side, often if you see this is the person running against Roy Cooper and I don't have a favorable opinion, opinion of Republicans. Again, also the generic Republican image. Even if you don't know who they are, you might end up saying, oh, they're Republican?
00:16:03
Speaker 3: Negative.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So we'll continue to keep an eye on that.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: Let's jump to another statewide race that we're going to see coming up here in November as well. That is the North Carolina Supreme Court. There's a lot on this race between the Republican Sarah Stevens, the Democrat Anita Earls, who is currently sitting on the state's high court running for re-election. This was a very close race when we polled it last in August. 43.3% said they were in favor of Earls. 39.7% said they were in favor of Stevens. We now transition to our September poll, and those numbers have flipped dramatically. Anita Earle's now at 47.2%. Sarah Stevens now at 36%. What was just a couple of points back just a month ago, David, is a race that, if these numbers verified, would not even be a competitive race by any stretch of the imagination.
00:16:54
Speaker 4: And this is what I was getting to maybe on, I think people don't really know these two candidates that well. They just see the Republican and the Democrat label. And earlier, I think there was more of a differentiation in people's minds between Trump and candidates connected to Trump versus generic Republican in this poll, I don't see as much of a differentiation. I see maybe this is because they don't know who these candidates are. I'm fairly sure most voters don't, even though we do, but I think they're thinking generic Republican, generic Democrat. And that's what this judicial race is in people's minds. And as that, um, kind of name brand of MAGA and Republican might be getting a little more fully immersed together in people's minds. And at least in this poll, it seems like to me, that would be the explanation there. There isn't any new scandal or anything for Sarah Stevens or there's nothing really other than that, that I could see that would have moved the numbers like that.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: Cause it's almost, was it nine points, you know, at this point. So.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is important to note over the last couple of years in North Carolina, we have seen Republicans do very well on these statewide judicial races, whether it is the North Carolina Supreme Court or the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Those are statewide elections, and Republicans have unseated plenty of Democrats in both of those races. That's another one that we'll be keeping a close eye on.
00:18:23
Speaker 2: This may answer all of our questions, David.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: Number 11 in our poll, if Donald Trump endorses a candidate, would that make you more or less likely to vote for that candidate? We know that Trump has put out plenty of endorsements campaigning here in North Carolina this week. 50.0% of voters say it would make them less likely to support a candidate. I guess this adds up with the high disapproval rating and some of the other numbers that we're seeing in this poll.
00:18:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was interesting to look at some of the crosstabs and the breakdowns by party and that nature, because Republicans are still fairly in Trump's corner. You look at them, it'll be a huge partisan breakdown where Democrats on a question like this, there's like 3% of people who say, oh, yeah, Trump endorsement makes me more likely. And Republicans, I think they're in the 80s percent. So, you know, not everybody, but mostly saying Trump endorsement is good.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: But there is.
00:19:19
Speaker 4: I think the problem for Republicans in this poll and what it suggests is that the independents and unaffiliateds, you can often tell how things are going. They can be a bellwether and they are tracking way more with the Democrats on questions like this than, you know, in other years you see them tracking way more with Republicans. You've seen that like during when Biden was in office, we'd see that sometimes, but they are now, almost entirely answering questions like this.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: And saying you know that's not.
00:19:52
Speaker 4: It um i would not vote for somebody or be more likely to vote for them because of trump there were you know a fair amount of people that were saying no difference so you saw a lot of those people as well but um it does seem like the unaffiliated uh independent voters are uh The Trump brand is not one that they're connecting with at this point.
00:20:14
Speaker 1: More details from our September Carolina Journal poll coming up after this. You're listening to the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: It's 538.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
00:20:33
Speaker 2: I'm Nick Craig. Good Friday morning to you.
00:20:36
Speaker 1: Continuing coverage of our September Carolina Journal poll with David Larson, the editor-in-chief of carolinajournal.com. For those that have not had a chance to take a look at their sample ballots yet, these are very long ballots that you are going to be voting, whether during the early voting period starting in October or or on election day, November the 3rd, you will have to flip it over to the other side. There are plenty of things on those. And there's a couple of interesting constitutional amendments that we're going to talk about. One deals with property taxes. The other deals with the income tax rate. The third dealing with voter ID. In a poll, David, that as we've walked through some of the details, seems to favor Democrats pretty heavily. All three of these questions as it relates to these constitutional amendments have very strong support. And I guess that adds on to and builds on to some of these constitutional amendments, whether it was voter ID. And in 2018, voters tend to support this stuff pretty much across the board.
00:21:31
Speaker 4: You did see Democrats on the voter ID question. They seem to come out fairly strongly against voter ID. Interestingly, black Democrats and black voters were majority for it, but all the white Democrats in the poll were against requiring voter ID. But overall, all three of these had exactly like two thirds support.
00:21:55
Speaker 3: So it shows that I think that.
00:21:59
Speaker 4: Even if the Republican brand and the Trump brand might be slipping, there's a lot of things that are common sense to voters that might have sort of a conservative lean, like.
00:22:10
Speaker 3: You should have ID when you vote.
00:22:12
Speaker 4: We should have lower taxes, although I will say asking voters whether their taxes should be higher or.
00:22:20
Speaker 3: Lower and, you know, and having a ballot amendment on it.
00:22:24
Speaker 4: It's hard to get them to generally say, I'm against capping the income tax that I might pay. So it's kind of often the way I see questions on taxes go, that people just, it sounds better intuitively to say, yeah.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: Cap the taxes, not as high.
00:22:45
Speaker 4: But yeah, two-thirds on all three of those, that'll be at least good news for Republicans and for those who like lower taxes.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course, the verbiage on the ballots themselves are maybe a little bit confusing, so we'll see if there's some level of confusion that plays into that as we see some of those early voting returns.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: Begin the process of coming back.
00:23:07
Speaker 4: All right.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: So generally a pretty negative poll for Republicans. This might shine some insight on it as well. In hindsight, do you think the decision to go to war with Iran was the right decision or wrong decision? 58.9% of voters say that that was the wrong decision compared to just 33.8% that say that's the right decision. We've seen all the impacts of that gas now well over $ 4 a gallon. We are seeing the price of oil well over $ 100 a barrel now consistently for the last couple of weeks. This war with Iran that the president started back in March, David, seems to be having some major lingering effects and very likely could cost Republicans a major wins coming up here in November.
00:23:50
Speaker 3: I am, I'm not so sure.
00:23:52
Speaker 4: I mean, it does show that, you know, people are opposed for the most part, you know, um, but I'm not so sure, like, do you, do you support continuing it? It's kind of 39 to 53 ish. Um, and, uh, Republicans are very, um, it's about 80% for the war, 19% against.
00:24:13
Speaker 3: So they're on the Republican side. It's fairly poor.
00:24:15
Speaker 4: I think there's a big part of it that, um, you know, it comes down to also Trump is doing this war. That's going to be negative. But when, when we've had our issue breakdown of what are the issues people are interested, I've been interested to know, even throughout this whole, um, you know, conflict with Iran prices economy, they've stayed up and national offensive war is such a low issue on people's minds.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: Interestingly.
00:24:41
Speaker 4: Uh, I think it might be because we don't have boots on the ground this time. Um, uh, that I'm not sure what the impact will be or if it's just another issue where Trump's making mistakes in my mind. And it's unclear to me. I will say it is interesting that among Republicans and among voters in general, it seemed the older the voter on this question, the more they supported the war. And then as you got younger, other than the, I think it was 34 to 45, they were more supportive, but all the other younger age groups didn't. where we're not in support of this um I will say just in terms of how polling and war has tended to operate sure um you saw this with um you know with Iraq and Afghanistan where you start a war you often have a lot of support this one I actually don't think that was the case but initially you would have a lot of support and in a democracy I just think um It can be difficult for the if you have an objective. I think it's difficult to do we complete the objective or do we kind of go with the winds of the democracy? Because that can shift drastically how people feel about a war.
00:25:52
Speaker 3: So commanders in chief.
00:25:53
Speaker 4: Sometimes have to weigh, OK, it's not popular right now. Does that mean we we stop it? Or because, you know, if you ask people in Russia, what they felt about the Ukraine war, Putin doesn't necessarily care.
00:26:06
Speaker 3: And he wouldn't necessarily change his game plan.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Democracies do probably take that into account a lot more, but it might be also difficult to meet whatever your objective you had when you started the war if you're putting your thumb to the wind too much.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: Well, when the president was in Gastonia on Wednesday, he promised some news on the Iran war.
00:26:28
Speaker 2: He has been saying that now for the last couple of months.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: So we'll wait and see if maybe in this very short time period, and I mean very short time period, that we have between now and election day there will be some major changes there that could provide some relief for him himself and the republicans let's jump in back into talk about a couple of other issues here we asked in your opinion how likely would roy cooper be to support the policy priorities of the democratic socialists of america or the dsa if elected to the united states senate i was a little surprised with this result david sixty percent of voters said that he would support these DSA policies. When you look at national polls, the DSA doesn't poll very well. Cooper is destroying Whatley in this race, as we already talked about, a 15-point advantage. And people seem to think, yeah, he's going to go along with this socialist movement. That doesn't seem to add up in my mind.
00:27:20
Speaker 3: It doesn't.
00:27:21
Speaker 4: Mitch Kokai, my colleague over here, put this in here. He was assuming Republicans would all say, yeah, he's going to be DSA and Democrats would say no. Interestingly, Democrats over 50 percent, just over 50 percent said, yes, he will be more likely to have the DSA policies. But the Democrats also overwhelmingly are going to vote for him. So you wonder, what does that say about the common Democrats opinion of Democrat socialism?
00:27:47
Speaker 3: I still think it's sort of interesting.
00:27:50
Speaker 4: It depends on how, um, how into the, the daily, uh, news cycle and, uh, political philosophy of things going on, what they might think of that word, uh, what does it mean to them?
00:28:01
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
00:28:02
Speaker 4: Um, you know, there's all these people who say, I'm going to vote for Cooper and, oh, the democratic social, oh, he's a Democrat.
00:28:09
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:28:10
Speaker 4: Maybe they're just thinking of it in that way where he's going to be a Democrat, but, um, you.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: Would, you would hope people would know a little bit more about that.
00:28:18
Speaker 4: Um, and the word socialism and, And what that might entail, because as you said, the DSA doesn't have a good brand nationally. So it might be something some of these Democrats are saying he might vote that way, but it's something that they would accept but not endorse.
00:28:35
Speaker 3: Who knows?
00:28:37
Speaker 2: Let's move on to our next question. I'm just going to mention it briefly.
00:28:39
Speaker 1: We asked people how likely would Michael Watley to be to support the policies of the Trump administration. The president was here in North Carolina this week supporting Michael Watley. I don't think it's any big surprise there. 73.9% said that he would be likely to do so. Only 9.2% said not very likely. There's obviously a very strong relationship there between the president and Republican Senate candidate Michael Watley. All right, David, let's talk about some other interesting issues that we've seen boiling up over the last couple of months. Data centers. This has been all the rage on social media. A lot of interesting discussion going on there. We asked, which of the following best represents your opinions about the development of data centers? The United States needs more large data centers, already has enough data centers, or has too many data centers currently.
00:29:27
Speaker 2: Kind of a mixed bag response here.
00:29:31
Speaker 1: The 32.5% of people said the US already has enough and we don't need to build anymore. 30.7% said we have too many. 17% said we need more. 19% unsure. I guess this is a pretty good scatterplot of people are kind of all over the map on this issue of data centers.
00:29:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was actually pretty widespread opposition to it.
00:29:52
Speaker 3: The sole groups that were.
00:29:54
Speaker 4: For it were rural white men who, like Trump, were about the only ones that said, bring data centers because we know that they lower your local tax rates and.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: Whatever reason, I think.
00:30:08
Speaker 4: Because I think there's been a real push I think Elon Musk was saying that there was like he found 200,000 or some crazy number of Chinese bots whose specific purpose was to make Americans worried about data centers, all of this with Chinese aim being to beat us on the AI race.
00:30:28
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that's the whole reason.
00:30:30
Speaker 4: There's probably some legitimate NIMBY. Well, there's some NIMBY reasons that people don't want them, things like that. But it is an interesting thing. I think some of it just reflects maybe an overall concern.
00:30:43
Speaker 3: About the, about technology.
00:30:45
Speaker 4: You hear these, um, these headlines, like a bunch of AI executives are saying that, um, they might, you know, AI might get.
00:30:54
Speaker 3: To the point where it causes a human extinction in the next few years.
00:30:58
Speaker 4: Or, you know, you hear like headlines like that. I think people are like, well, I don't necessarily want that then. Cause I mean, there's not a, it's hard for me to find really the, uh, the core dispute with having a data center other than that concern because you know in the past factories have been much more smelly and noisy and these are kind of just like giant warehouses with computer data you know in in them so it's uh not necessarily you wouldn't think Compared to past warehouses and factories that people are clamoring for more manufacturing and all that, that this would be something people would be concerned about.
00:31:37
Speaker 3: But it obviously is. Yeah.
00:31:39
Speaker 2: And we saw the president.
00:31:40
Speaker 1: I saw some people describing it as crashing out this week over data centers in his posts on True Social really kind of go into the paint, David, on support. we're continuing to build data centers. But our next question was, would you support or oppose a new data center being built near your community? I think this is the largest of anything that we saw in the poll. 70.4% of people opposed it with 58.5% strongly opposing it. A very slim number of people, about 16.5% said that they would support a local data center in their community or in their backyard. So this remains a major issue for local governments. We've seen many of these meetings and discussions taking place at the local level over the last couple of months. So we'll be keeping an eye on that as well. There is a lot more in our poll that we did not have a chance to get into this morning. We've got a link to the cross tabs that David referenced in a full PDF of all the questions, all the polls. We encourage you Check out all of those details this morning. They're over on our website, carolinajournal.com. We appreciate the insight this morning. The editor-in-chief of Carolina Journal, David Larson, joins us on the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Good morning again.
00:32:53
Speaker 1: It's 5.56. Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour. Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM. WBT recapping the big story out of our September Carolina Journal poll. Very bleak numbers for Republican Senate candidate Michael Watley. According to our poll, Roy Cooper has 49.2% support compared to just 34.1% for Watley. That is a 15.1% advantage for the former eight-year governor here in North Carolina. We have been polling this race for months now, going all the way back to March, and that lead has continued to grow in our Carolina Journal poll. We are 47 days away from Election Day. Early voting kicks off here on October the 15th as we approach Election Day on November the 3rd. We are going to see a lot happening in a variety of different races. We saw President Donald Trump in Gastonia on Wednesday, stumping for Whatley and Republican candidates like Lori Buckout and Jennifer Bulkham, those two individuals running in North Carolina's 1st and 11th Congressional District. We will be continuing our polls. We'll be continuing to follow all of these very important races across the state over on our website, carolinajournal.com. It is, of course, always right here on the Carolina Journal NewsHour. That's going to do it for a Friday edition. WBT News is next, followed by Good Morning BT. We are back with you Monday morning, 5 to 6, right here on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
Speaker 1: It's 5.05 and welcome in to a Friday edition of the Carolina Journal NewsHour on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
00:00:19
Speaker 2: I'm Nick Craig. Good morning to you. We are less than.
00:00:22
Speaker 1: 50 days away from Election Day here across the state of North Carolina. We've been covering a lot of detail over the last couple of weeks here on the Carolina Journal NewsHour and over on our website, carolinajournal.com, is a plethora of races going on. across North Carolina begin the process of materializing now that we are past the Labor Day weekend. We've got a brand new Carolina Journal poll out today that we're going to walk through the details of. Some very interesting numbers in this. To help us through that, it's my pleasure to welcome the brand new editor-in-chief of CarolinaJournal.com, David Larson, to the Carolina Journal NewsHour this morning. All right, David, we start these polls off at the top and kind of work our way down. Let's take a look at the Trump job approval and the direction of the country.
00:01:05
Speaker 2: We talked about this last month. Things are pretty much the same.
00:01:08
Speaker 1: People are not very optimistic about the direction of the country and the president's current disapproval rating.
00:01:14
Speaker 3: It's 57.1%. Ouch.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: Yes, it looks pretty similar on the Trump job approval as it did last time, which was in August. Slightly worse, actually, on the disapproved, not by much, by half a percent or so. And that strongly disapproved still being above 50 percent, 51 percent strongly.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: That's that's a tough number to.
00:01:40
Speaker 4: Overcome, I guess, on coattails and just the general feeling for his party often in that situation.
00:01:48
Speaker 3: Uh midterms of the second.
00:01:49
Speaker 4: Term the president's party will will suffer as it is and and maybe lose some seats so that that will probably come to bear a little bit based on that disapproval you see also the as you said the right direction wrong track numbers still sliding a little bit in terms of um those who think it's we're you know going the right direction was 34 percent last time now it's closer to 33 percent and wrong track was more like a little under 61, and now it's about over 61. So not too much movement, but none of it's in a good direction necessarily for Republicans.
00:02:23
Speaker 1: Let me ask you a little bit about that. President Donald Trump obviously is around and about. We saw him here in North Carolina this week stumping for Michael Watley.
00:02:32
Speaker 2: But David, his name is not actually.
00:02:34
Speaker 1: On the ballot, even though he's been telling people in one of his new lines is pretend that I'm on the ballot. I guess some of these numbers would indicate that maybe he shouldn't be telling people to pretend that he is on the ballot because these numbers are just not indicative of a president that is popular at this point in time.
00:02:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the numbers have been slipping over time. Like you see back in March, it was, you know, 53 and a half, 54% disapprove and only 46.8% was the strongest approve. So those are numbers you could kind of work with. And also what I noticed back then too was, There was a stronger, we'll get into this with some of the later numbers, but there was a stronger divergence between the way people thought about President Trump and maybe how they thought about generic Republicans. But I see that as sort of fading at this point and there being anything Republican and anything Trump is sort of in the same item in people's minds where even not that long ago and a couple of months ago in our polls, We would see, you know, the MAGA brand was really starting to struggle. But the Republican brand, when you ask about generic ballot and things of that nature, you know, we'll talk about those numbers in a bit. But I do think those are starting to converge. And it's Trump's party, even if he's not at the top of the ballot.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, because this is kind of interesting for us, our friends over at the Carolina Journal, many of our audience that follows this stuff day in and day out. David, the reality is the vast majority of North Carolinians do not. You think some of these stronger opinions start coming up when we get closer to an election cycle? I mean, we talked about what was going on back in March. We saw the primary turnout was abysmal as usual. But as we approach the general and get closer to that election, it seems like more and more people get engaged and maybe start forming opinions on things that they haven't thought about. And in some cases, maybe a year or so since the last time they voted in a general election.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: And that's fair. I mean, we are a political junkie.
00:04:35
Speaker 4: So to us, we're, we're analyzing all these numbers and assuming everybody else, there's gotta be a reason that this thing moves a little bit that way or, but a lot of times, you know, people aren't really as, uh, watching, watching the political.
00:04:48
Speaker 3: Winds as we are. Um, so, you know, that's fair. Like you look at, um, the way the.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: Undecided voters or which politicians people have heard of. You know, there's a lot of, I mean, you know, when you look at legislative leaders that we will hear their names every day, you ask every day, North Carolina voters, what they think about, you know, Phil Berger. And they, a lot of them, I mean, I think, I'm trying to remember what the numbers were, but it was a vast majority aren't even familiar with that name, you know, Phil Berger.
00:05:23
Speaker 3: And most people, they're not familiar with their mayor.
00:05:26
Speaker 4: It's just there's so much competing noise now that it's not like you get the local paper, you read about what your mayor is doing. And you read about the state legislature. People are focusing on international things. They're focused on all kinds of entertainment. And as you said, maybe they're not quite paying attention yet until it seems like, oh, you know what, I should. Time's getting near. Maybe I should start really digging into who these candidates are.
00:05:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll see that as early voting kicks off in less than a month here across North Carolina. Let's move to North Carolina. We just talked a little bit about President Donald Trump. For Governor Josh Stein, his approval rating rebounding a little bit. We saw a low of 47.2% in August. He's now back up to 49.4% in terms of what voters seem to think of him. David, he's on the positive trend.
00:06:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's had interesting numbers in part because his election was an unusual one in that he had a just blowout election over Mark Robinson.
00:06:26
Speaker 3: And so there was.
00:06:28
Speaker 4: There was a lot of Republicans, were a lot of Republicans that were, it looks like for a while, really giving him a shot because they might have voted for him and they wanted to.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: Validate that in their minds probably.
00:06:41
Speaker 4: But that number started slipping, as you noted, for a while that, you know, as he starts governing and they remember, you know, I am a Republican and I don't typically vote. have approval for the Democrat governors, but maybe that hit its floor. And similar thing with Cooper, he always had that just right around 50% sort of numbers. So I think he's playing a similar game plan. He might actually be playing it a little bit more conciliatory even to Republicans. And Cooper would do a lot more vetoes and a lot more harsh rhetoric. Seems like Stein's trying to play that You know, he'll likely govern similarly to the left, like Cooper did, but at least in his messaging and his, you know, how he portrays himself to the public, he seems like he's going for moderate, nothing too crazy. And so maybe we won't see anything drastic like a drop down in his numbers for a while.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: 49.4% said they approve of the governor's job. 32.9% say they disapprove. We'll be keeping an eye on that in our polls that will follow in the months ahead. Let's move over to some of these generic legislative ballots and maybe explain a little bit. while we go through this process, there's way too many lawmakers here in North Carolina. As David just noted a couple of minutes ago, the vast majority of people have no idea who their lawmaker is. So we asked the question, if the 2026 general election were held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democrat candidate in the North Carolina state legislature? 49.5% David said they'd support the Democrat compared to 41.3 that would support the Republican. This is a pretty important number as a Republicans have held majorities in both chambers over the last 15 years.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: Maybe we see a crack this year?
00:08:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does seem like so.
00:08:32
Speaker 4: The numbers have been moving pretty steadily from, you know, Democrats had 45 percent, then it was 47 and a half, 48, now 49 and a half. So they have an eight point lead, 8.2 percent over Republicans. And I would say that, you know, there are there's 28 races. Andy Jackson over the Civitas Center here at John Locke Foundation. He looks into all these numbers, analyzes the districts. He says there's 28 races that are most competitive, but they're competitive. The reason it's kind of condensed into those specific races out of 170 races is the maps are pretty well laid out where Republicans, even if they are down a bit, I don't think they're going to see huge losses that will take away the majorities. But, you know, they might move a bit below an area where they'll be able to override vetoes, let's say.
00:09:25
Speaker 3: So that's more of what's probable if they're down eight points going into it.
00:09:31
Speaker 4: And a lot of those races are in Wake County and Mecklenburg County, a lot of these races that are more competitive. So there's a lot of people moving into these areas that are from more cosmopolitan areas from around the.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: Country and maybe are going to be leaning more towards the Democrats.
00:09:48
Speaker 4: So I do think, you know, if these numbers stay, it will probably be an advantage to the Democrats.
00:09:54
Speaker 3: But with the maps, I wouldn't say anything overly drastic is going to happen.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: We'll, of course, be keeping a close eye on the legislature as well as we get closer to November. We will dive into details on the all-important U.S. Senate race here in North Carolina coming up. You're listening to the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: It's 520.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT. We are joined this morning by David Larson, the brand new editor-in-chief of CarolinaJournal.com, going through details of our September Carolina Journal poll.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: Here in North Carolina, a major United States Senate race.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: I mentioned a little while ago the president here in North Carolina this week in Gastonia, stumping for Michael Watley, the Republican Senate candidate. He's He is battling against the former eight year governor before that attorney general, before that member of the North Carolina general assembly in Roy Cooper. These are some pitiful numbers for Michael Watley. David, he is now down 15.1% compared to Roy Cooper, 49.2 for Cooper, 34.1 for Watley.
00:11:00
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:11:00
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:11:01
Speaker 2: 15 points, 15.1 points.
00:11:01
Speaker 4: Um, The trend from March 2026 until now has been just a widening. I know there's other polls that have shown things a bit closer. Ours has just gone from.
00:11:22
Speaker 3: 8 points to 11 to 12.5.
00:11:23
Speaker 4: Now to 15.1. So it's over time. This is the first one where we've added Shannon Bray, the Libertarian candidate, and also Michael Dublin, the Green Party.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: So that changed things a bit.
00:11:40
Speaker 4: It actually brought Roy Cooper's numbers down from 51.5 to 49.2. But it also brought Whatley's numbers down about five points. So a loss of two for Cooper, but a loss of five for Whatley as we added in those other candidates.
00:11:57
Speaker 3: And it's not good.
00:11:59
Speaker 4: We can also talk about the question right above that we asked about Michael Watley and Roy Cooper in terms of what voters think about them, not whether they're going to vote for them or whatever.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: But when you hear about Michael Watley, what are your opinions?
00:12:16
Speaker 4: And I think this goes to the heart of maybe what What the issue is for him is he was fairly unknown comparatively. Roy Cooper has this will be his seventh statewide election. Cooper won six for his attorney general and two as governor for governor. And Roy Cooper, I mean, Michael Wiley, this will be his first statewide race, first really.
00:12:37
Speaker 3: Race of any kind.
00:12:38
Speaker 4: Kind of outside of, you know, party selections and people you had the never heard of numbers for Michael Watley are at 18 percent and no opinion or 13 percent. So those are kind of the people who have a question mark in their heads about him. So that's that's 32 percent of people and 32 percent of people still are thinking, you know, who exactly is this? And that's higher than his favorable rating, which is 26 percent. So you have more people who are not sure who he is than who are favorable to him. And maybe more painful than that is the unfavorable number is 42%.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: So there's quite a few more people.
00:13:18
Speaker 4: It's almost the same as for Cooper, but Cooper has a higher favorable than he does his unfavorable. So he has 47% favorable, 43% unfavorable. Um, and only 2% of people have never heard of Roy Cooper. So that for a, um, You know, a statewide candidate running for state elections, that's actually a very, very low number, as we talked about earlier, because people don't know leaders of the Senate and the House and all that in states that have only 2% of people say, I don't know who Roy Cooper is. He's very well known at this point, you know, running on statewide ballot. But yeah, that's... Wally is struggling. According to our numbers, I know there's others that say, oh, it might be getting closer.
00:14:05
Speaker 3: But who knows with the anomalous number, maybe it'll end up being them or us.
00:14:09
Speaker 4: But there's kind of a range of polling numbers between, say, seven. And I guess we're probably the widest gap I've seen. So it's not looking good if these are the real numbers.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Let me ask you, you were talking about the favorable, unfavorable, and there's no question about it with Michael Wally having never run a statewide campaign before that the vast majority of people don't know who he is. But I found the unfavorable very interesting. You mentioned Roy Cooper's unfavorability in our poll. is at 43.1%, but practically everybody knows who he is, so they have a strong opinion one way or the other. We go to Michael Watley, his unfavorable is almost exactly the same, David, at 42.0, yet you still have more than 30% of people that don't know.
00:14:52
Speaker 3: Who he is.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: That seems odd.
00:14:54
Speaker 1: I wouldn't expect to see an unfavorable number so high on a relatively unknown candidate in comparison to the former eight-year governor.
00:15:03
Speaker 4: I think Cooper's been able to run, you know, his ads and his campaign. He's fairly well defined and he knows his image at the moment. You know, a lot of people approve of him more than not. So he's been able to focus a lot of his advertising on defining, you know, if there isn't a name ID in people's minds, you know, people talk about campaigns, positive name ID. If there really isn't any name ID, positive or negative, he's been able to spend a lot of his campaign energy in defining Michael Watley negatively.
00:15:35
Speaker 3: And so I think those numbers show that to.
00:15:38
Speaker 4: The degree that he's doing that, it might be showing some success. And also, you know, if people on the Democrat side, often if you see this is the person running against Roy Cooper and I don't have a favorable opinion, opinion of Republicans. Again, also the generic Republican image. Even if you don't know who they are, you might end up saying, oh, they're Republican?
00:16:03
Speaker 3: Negative.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So we'll continue to keep an eye on that.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: Let's jump to another statewide race that we're going to see coming up here in November as well. That is the North Carolina Supreme Court. There's a lot on this race between the Republican Sarah Stevens, the Democrat Anita Earls, who is currently sitting on the state's high court running for re-election. This was a very close race when we polled it last in August. 43.3% said they were in favor of Earls. 39.7% said they were in favor of Stevens. We now transition to our September poll, and those numbers have flipped dramatically. Anita Earle's now at 47.2%. Sarah Stevens now at 36%. What was just a couple of points back just a month ago, David, is a race that, if these numbers verified, would not even be a competitive race by any stretch of the imagination.
00:16:54
Speaker 4: And this is what I was getting to maybe on, I think people don't really know these two candidates that well. They just see the Republican and the Democrat label. And earlier, I think there was more of a differentiation in people's minds between Trump and candidates connected to Trump versus generic Republican in this poll, I don't see as much of a differentiation. I see maybe this is because they don't know who these candidates are. I'm fairly sure most voters don't, even though we do, but I think they're thinking generic Republican, generic Democrat. And that's what this judicial race is in people's minds. And as that, um, kind of name brand of MAGA and Republican might be getting a little more fully immersed together in people's minds. And at least in this poll, it seems like to me, that would be the explanation there. There isn't any new scandal or anything for Sarah Stevens or there's nothing really other than that, that I could see that would have moved the numbers like that.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: Cause it's almost, was it nine points, you know, at this point. So.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is important to note over the last couple of years in North Carolina, we have seen Republicans do very well on these statewide judicial races, whether it is the North Carolina Supreme Court or the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Those are statewide elections, and Republicans have unseated plenty of Democrats in both of those races. That's another one that we'll be keeping a close eye on.
00:18:23
Speaker 2: This may answer all of our questions, David.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: Number 11 in our poll, if Donald Trump endorses a candidate, would that make you more or less likely to vote for that candidate? We know that Trump has put out plenty of endorsements campaigning here in North Carolina this week. 50.0% of voters say it would make them less likely to support a candidate. I guess this adds up with the high disapproval rating and some of the other numbers that we're seeing in this poll.
00:18:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was interesting to look at some of the crosstabs and the breakdowns by party and that nature, because Republicans are still fairly in Trump's corner. You look at them, it'll be a huge partisan breakdown where Democrats on a question like this, there's like 3% of people who say, oh, yeah, Trump endorsement makes me more likely. And Republicans, I think they're in the 80s percent. So, you know, not everybody, but mostly saying Trump endorsement is good.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: But there is.
00:19:19
Speaker 4: I think the problem for Republicans in this poll and what it suggests is that the independents and unaffiliateds, you can often tell how things are going. They can be a bellwether and they are tracking way more with the Democrats on questions like this than, you know, in other years you see them tracking way more with Republicans. You've seen that like during when Biden was in office, we'd see that sometimes, but they are now, almost entirely answering questions like this.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: And saying you know that's not.
00:19:52
Speaker 4: It um i would not vote for somebody or be more likely to vote for them because of trump there were you know a fair amount of people that were saying no difference so you saw a lot of those people as well but um it does seem like the unaffiliated uh independent voters are uh The Trump brand is not one that they're connecting with at this point.
00:20:14
Speaker 1: More details from our September Carolina Journal poll coming up after this. You're listening to the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: It's 538.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
00:20:33
Speaker 2: I'm Nick Craig. Good Friday morning to you.
00:20:36
Speaker 1: Continuing coverage of our September Carolina Journal poll with David Larson, the editor-in-chief of carolinajournal.com. For those that have not had a chance to take a look at their sample ballots yet, these are very long ballots that you are going to be voting, whether during the early voting period starting in October or or on election day, November the 3rd, you will have to flip it over to the other side. There are plenty of things on those. And there's a couple of interesting constitutional amendments that we're going to talk about. One deals with property taxes. The other deals with the income tax rate. The third dealing with voter ID. In a poll, David, that as we've walked through some of the details, seems to favor Democrats pretty heavily. All three of these questions as it relates to these constitutional amendments have very strong support. And I guess that adds on to and builds on to some of these constitutional amendments, whether it was voter ID. And in 2018, voters tend to support this stuff pretty much across the board.
00:21:31
Speaker 4: You did see Democrats on the voter ID question. They seem to come out fairly strongly against voter ID. Interestingly, black Democrats and black voters were majority for it, but all the white Democrats in the poll were against requiring voter ID. But overall, all three of these had exactly like two thirds support.
00:21:55
Speaker 3: So it shows that I think that.
00:21:59
Speaker 4: Even if the Republican brand and the Trump brand might be slipping, there's a lot of things that are common sense to voters that might have sort of a conservative lean, like.
00:22:10
Speaker 3: You should have ID when you vote.
00:22:12
Speaker 4: We should have lower taxes, although I will say asking voters whether their taxes should be higher or.
00:22:20
Speaker 3: Lower and, you know, and having a ballot amendment on it.
00:22:24
Speaker 4: It's hard to get them to generally say, I'm against capping the income tax that I might pay. So it's kind of often the way I see questions on taxes go, that people just, it sounds better intuitively to say, yeah.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: Cap the taxes, not as high.
00:22:45
Speaker 4: But yeah, two-thirds on all three of those, that'll be at least good news for Republicans and for those who like lower taxes.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course, the verbiage on the ballots themselves are maybe a little bit confusing, so we'll see if there's some level of confusion that plays into that as we see some of those early voting returns.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: Begin the process of coming back.
00:23:07
Speaker 4: All right.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: So generally a pretty negative poll for Republicans. This might shine some insight on it as well. In hindsight, do you think the decision to go to war with Iran was the right decision or wrong decision? 58.9% of voters say that that was the wrong decision compared to just 33.8% that say that's the right decision. We've seen all the impacts of that gas now well over $ 4 a gallon. We are seeing the price of oil well over $ 100 a barrel now consistently for the last couple of weeks. This war with Iran that the president started back in March, David, seems to be having some major lingering effects and very likely could cost Republicans a major wins coming up here in November.
00:23:50
Speaker 3: I am, I'm not so sure.
00:23:52
Speaker 4: I mean, it does show that, you know, people are opposed for the most part, you know, um, but I'm not so sure, like, do you, do you support continuing it? It's kind of 39 to 53 ish. Um, and, uh, Republicans are very, um, it's about 80% for the war, 19% against.
00:24:13
Speaker 3: So they're on the Republican side. It's fairly poor.
00:24:15
Speaker 4: I think there's a big part of it that, um, you know, it comes down to also Trump is doing this war. That's going to be negative. But when, when we've had our issue breakdown of what are the issues people are interested, I've been interested to know, even throughout this whole, um, you know, conflict with Iran prices economy, they've stayed up and national offensive war is such a low issue on people's minds.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: Interestingly.
00:24:41
Speaker 4: Uh, I think it might be because we don't have boots on the ground this time. Um, uh, that I'm not sure what the impact will be or if it's just another issue where Trump's making mistakes in my mind. And it's unclear to me. I will say it is interesting that among Republicans and among voters in general, it seemed the older the voter on this question, the more they supported the war. And then as you got younger, other than the, I think it was 34 to 45, they were more supportive, but all the other younger age groups didn't. where we're not in support of this um I will say just in terms of how polling and war has tended to operate sure um you saw this with um you know with Iraq and Afghanistan where you start a war you often have a lot of support this one I actually don't think that was the case but initially you would have a lot of support and in a democracy I just think um It can be difficult for the if you have an objective. I think it's difficult to do we complete the objective or do we kind of go with the winds of the democracy? Because that can shift drastically how people feel about a war.
00:25:52
Speaker 3: So commanders in chief.
00:25:53
Speaker 4: Sometimes have to weigh, OK, it's not popular right now. Does that mean we we stop it? Or because, you know, if you ask people in Russia, what they felt about the Ukraine war, Putin doesn't necessarily care.
00:26:06
Speaker 3: And he wouldn't necessarily change his game plan.
00:26:08
Speaker 4: Democracies do probably take that into account a lot more, but it might be also difficult to meet whatever your objective you had when you started the war if you're putting your thumb to the wind too much.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: Well, when the president was in Gastonia on Wednesday, he promised some news on the Iran war.
00:26:28
Speaker 2: He has been saying that now for the last couple of months.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: So we'll wait and see if maybe in this very short time period, and I mean very short time period, that we have between now and election day there will be some major changes there that could provide some relief for him himself and the republicans let's jump in back into talk about a couple of other issues here we asked in your opinion how likely would roy cooper be to support the policy priorities of the democratic socialists of america or the dsa if elected to the united states senate i was a little surprised with this result david sixty percent of voters said that he would support these DSA policies. When you look at national polls, the DSA doesn't poll very well. Cooper is destroying Whatley in this race, as we already talked about, a 15-point advantage. And people seem to think, yeah, he's going to go along with this socialist movement. That doesn't seem to add up in my mind.
00:27:20
Speaker 3: It doesn't.
00:27:21
Speaker 4: Mitch Kokai, my colleague over here, put this in here. He was assuming Republicans would all say, yeah, he's going to be DSA and Democrats would say no. Interestingly, Democrats over 50 percent, just over 50 percent said, yes, he will be more likely to have the DSA policies. But the Democrats also overwhelmingly are going to vote for him. So you wonder, what does that say about the common Democrats opinion of Democrat socialism?
00:27:47
Speaker 3: I still think it's sort of interesting.
00:27:50
Speaker 4: It depends on how, um, how into the, the daily, uh, news cycle and, uh, political philosophy of things going on, what they might think of that word, uh, what does it mean to them?
00:28:01
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
00:28:02
Speaker 4: Um, you know, there's all these people who say, I'm going to vote for Cooper and, oh, the democratic social, oh, he's a Democrat.
00:28:09
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:28:10
Speaker 4: Maybe they're just thinking of it in that way where he's going to be a Democrat, but, um, you.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: Would, you would hope people would know a little bit more about that.
00:28:18
Speaker 4: Um, and the word socialism and, And what that might entail, because as you said, the DSA doesn't have a good brand nationally. So it might be something some of these Democrats are saying he might vote that way, but it's something that they would accept but not endorse.
00:28:35
Speaker 3: Who knows?
00:28:37
Speaker 2: Let's move on to our next question. I'm just going to mention it briefly.
00:28:39
Speaker 1: We asked people how likely would Michael Watley to be to support the policies of the Trump administration. The president was here in North Carolina this week supporting Michael Watley. I don't think it's any big surprise there. 73.9% said that he would be likely to do so. Only 9.2% said not very likely. There's obviously a very strong relationship there between the president and Republican Senate candidate Michael Watley. All right, David, let's talk about some other interesting issues that we've seen boiling up over the last couple of months. Data centers. This has been all the rage on social media. A lot of interesting discussion going on there. We asked, which of the following best represents your opinions about the development of data centers? The United States needs more large data centers, already has enough data centers, or has too many data centers currently.
00:29:27
Speaker 2: Kind of a mixed bag response here.
00:29:31
Speaker 1: The 32.5% of people said the US already has enough and we don't need to build anymore. 30.7% said we have too many. 17% said we need more. 19% unsure. I guess this is a pretty good scatterplot of people are kind of all over the map on this issue of data centers.
00:29:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was actually pretty widespread opposition to it.
00:29:52
Speaker 3: The sole groups that were.
00:29:54
Speaker 4: For it were rural white men who, like Trump, were about the only ones that said, bring data centers because we know that they lower your local tax rates and.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: Whatever reason, I think.
00:30:08
Speaker 4: Because I think there's been a real push I think Elon Musk was saying that there was like he found 200,000 or some crazy number of Chinese bots whose specific purpose was to make Americans worried about data centers, all of this with Chinese aim being to beat us on the AI race.
00:30:28
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that's the whole reason.
00:30:30
Speaker 4: There's probably some legitimate NIMBY. Well, there's some NIMBY reasons that people don't want them, things like that. But it is an interesting thing. I think some of it just reflects maybe an overall concern.
00:30:43
Speaker 3: About the, about technology.
00:30:45
Speaker 4: You hear these, um, these headlines, like a bunch of AI executives are saying that, um, they might, you know, AI might get.
00:30:54
Speaker 3: To the point where it causes a human extinction in the next few years.
00:30:58
Speaker 4: Or, you know, you hear like headlines like that. I think people are like, well, I don't necessarily want that then. Cause I mean, there's not a, it's hard for me to find really the, uh, the core dispute with having a data center other than that concern because you know in the past factories have been much more smelly and noisy and these are kind of just like giant warehouses with computer data you know in in them so it's uh not necessarily you wouldn't think Compared to past warehouses and factories that people are clamoring for more manufacturing and all that, that this would be something people would be concerned about.
00:31:37
Speaker 3: But it obviously is. Yeah.
00:31:39
Speaker 2: And we saw the president.
00:31:40
Speaker 1: I saw some people describing it as crashing out this week over data centers in his posts on True Social really kind of go into the paint, David, on support. we're continuing to build data centers. But our next question was, would you support or oppose a new data center being built near your community? I think this is the largest of anything that we saw in the poll. 70.4% of people opposed it with 58.5% strongly opposing it. A very slim number of people, about 16.5% said that they would support a local data center in their community or in their backyard. So this remains a major issue for local governments. We've seen many of these meetings and discussions taking place at the local level over the last couple of months. So we'll be keeping an eye on that as well. There is a lot more in our poll that we did not have a chance to get into this morning. We've got a link to the cross tabs that David referenced in a full PDF of all the questions, all the polls. We encourage you Check out all of those details this morning. They're over on our website, carolinajournal.com. We appreciate the insight this morning. The editor-in-chief of Carolina Journal, David Larson, joins us on the Carolina Journal NewsHour.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Good morning again.
00:32:53
Speaker 1: It's 5.56. Welcome back to the Carolina Journal NewsHour. Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM. WBT recapping the big story out of our September Carolina Journal poll. Very bleak numbers for Republican Senate candidate Michael Watley. According to our poll, Roy Cooper has 49.2% support compared to just 34.1% for Watley. That is a 15.1% advantage for the former eight-year governor here in North Carolina. We have been polling this race for months now, going all the way back to March, and that lead has continued to grow in our Carolina Journal poll. We are 47 days away from Election Day. Early voting kicks off here on October the 15th as we approach Election Day on November the 3rd. We are going to see a lot happening in a variety of different races. We saw President Donald Trump in Gastonia on Wednesday, stumping for Whatley and Republican candidates like Lori Buckout and Jennifer Bulkham, those two individuals running in North Carolina's 1st and 11th Congressional District. We will be continuing our polls. We'll be continuing to follow all of these very important races across the state over on our website, carolinajournal.com. It is, of course, always right here on the Carolina Journal NewsHour. That's going to do it for a Friday edition. WBT News is next, followed by Good Morning BT. We are back with you Monday morning, 5 to 6, right here on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
