SILER CITY, N.C. — At the epicenter of President Joe Biden’s promised economic boom, a slow tractor can still halt traffic.
Just 81,000 people live in rural Chatham County, North Carolina. There are 1,076 farms. The old mill now houses a dance studio, a grocer and a steakhouse. For work, many people have no choice but to commute to nearby Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
But after years of careful planning, Chatham County has started to change.
The new Wolfspeed factory — six football fields long — overlooks I-64 and will soon produce advanced wafers for computer chips. Automaker Vinfast is scheduled to open a factory as well. Both projects stem in large part from incentives that Biden signed into law.
Developers, including the Walt Disney Corp., plan to build several thousand new homes.
“When the right opportunity came along, we were there and we were ready,” said Greg Lewis, who owns the steakhouse. “It is growth, growth, growth.”
That same economic story is being replicated in a number of other critical battleground states, including Arizona and Georgia.
But while the kind of enthusiasm voiced by Lewis would usually mean a strong tailwind for an incumbent president, so far this election year there is little evidence from polling that Americans are giving Biden credit for the gains as voters still focus instead on inflation still climbing at 3.4% annually.
Places like Chatham County show how this year’s presidential campaign offers two conflicting visions for America’s economic future.
Voters face a decades-defining choice about what can do more for growth: former President Donald Trump’s preference for tax cuts skewed toward business and the wealthy or the targeted government investments backed by Biden as well as possible tax increases to fund programs for the middle class.
The county backed Biden over Trump in 2020 but sits in the solidly Republican congressional district of Rep. Richard Hudson. He voted against the Democratic president’s policies and his office declined to answer questions about whether the investments in his district are a positive.
Just how much the influx of federal and private sector money affects the political dynamics in North Carolina and beyond will have a lot to say about who will win November’s presidential election.
Biden is campaigning on how his policies have helped pump hundreds of billions of dollars in private and federal investment into companies, helping to revive the faded computer chip sector and…
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