North Carolina Senate race puts affordability front and center

CONCORD, N.C. – Rachel Wagoner describes Concord, North Carolina, as the kind of place where she always envisioned raising her three children: safe, with good schools, a lively downtown and neighborhoods filled with other families.

But lately, that idyllic life has become harder to afford. Wagoner stays home with the three children she has with her husband while he works outside the home, but rising grocery and gasoline costs have squeezed the family’s budget enough that she has spent the past year considering going back to a paid job. 

“It gets harder and harder to make ends meet,” Wagoner told CNBC. Things her family once considered routine “have now become a luxury, like eating out and coming and shopping downtown.”

The cost-of-living squeeze has become a defining issue in North Carolina’s pivotal open Senate race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, as well as in numerous other contests that will determine control of the chamber.

Meanwhile, Concord keeps growing. Across Cabarrus County, just northeast of Charlotte, subdivisions are spreading, major employers are expanding and billions of dollars in investment are pouring in, including from Eli Lilly. Unemployment is low and poverty is below the national rate. 

Essentially, the county is prospering by most measures. Yet talk to many residents, and that prosperity feels out of reach.

“Everything feels big,” said Nichole Mattes, a mother in nearby Kannapolis who said rent, gasoline and groceries have left her living paycheck to paycheck. “You can’t be a single-income household right now. … It feels impossible.”

Senate candidate and former two-term Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has spent months campaigning under the slogan “Make Stuff Cost Less.”

“From the grocery store to the gas station, working families here in Concord and around the state are hurting as prices skyrocket,” Cooper said at a Sept. 2 event.

His opponent, Republican Michael Whatley, is trying to flip the script by arguing that Democrats like Cooper helped create today’s affordability headaches.

The former Republican National Committee chair and a close ally of President Donald Trump has pointed to increases in energy, healthcare and housing costs during Cooper’s tenure and attacked his opposition to Republican tax cuts.

“If Candidate Cooper wants to ‘make stuff cost less,’ he oughta look in the mirror,” Whatley campaign spokesman DJ Griffin said in a statement to CNBC.

It’s up to voters to choose who to blame, said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.  

“Both candidates know people are dissatisfied and feeling the squeeze,” Bitzer told CNBC. “Cooper wants voters focused on what they are paying now. Whatley wants them to trace those costs through Cooper’s tenure in Raleigh and the inflation of the Biden years.”