North of Charlotte, N.C., voters of both parties can see through the GOP’s strategy of frightening them about an urban crime wave.
CORNELIUS, N.C. — A few years back, in the middle of the day in the middle of a week in the spring, in the parking garage of an upscale mall in Charlotte half an hour south from her house here in the suburbs, Susan Sandler was attacked. A young Black man in a hoodie hit her in the side of the head as she walked to her car. He knocked her unconscious and dragged her across the concrete, took her purse and her wedding ring and left her with ripped jeans and bleeding knees.
If anybody, I thought, might be receptive to the president’s racially loaded warnings of crime spreading from cities and promises to keep the suburbs safe …
“Um, no,” said Sandler, a Democrat who is 59, white and married to a Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will again (she thinks) come November.
“He fuels the fire and wants to make people like me feel like it’s coming this way,” she said Monday. “It’s just Trump’s rhetoric to try to scare people.” Continue reading.