Big Daddy Has Big Lead Where Expected

Happy Wednesday, Friends,

I lived in North Carolina for 23 years. Both my sons were born and raised in Raleigh and are still there.

I anchored the state's legislative report on TV for nine sessions, covered the governor, and traveled the state for years reporting for a North Carolina news magazine show.

I know the plain folk who make up the reddest part of that purple state, and I know what makes them tick.

Long ago we referred to them as 'salt-of-the-earth' type folk; more recently as Good Ole Boys.

They liked to keep things simple. Black or white was good--gray, not so much. They were likely to have the next pig pickin' on their minds rather than the finer points of Faust.

These five states would probably be more like the rest of the country
 if they were better read than red.

Any answer you'd need to any question was surely addressed in the Bible, which was, of course, infallible.

Being so full of country wisdom, it wasn't so important to have a formal education. Their simple rural way of life worked well for them.

That lifestyle centered around the family, in which Daddy ruled. And Daddy's word trumped all but that of God, who wasn't around very often to intervene.

Having that strong voice telling you what to do made life easy, secure, and somehow comforting.

A strong Daddy was the way of the rural South. And it still is in much of it, even as the South begrudgingly transitions into the 21st century.

Take this morning's Magellan poll, measuring the presidential race in Mississippi--perennially mired at the bottom of the 50 states in education.

It shows that Donald Trump is leading the presidential race by 13 points.

No great surprise, 65% of the respondents were white. That's about their same percentage of the state's population. And almost half of them were registered Republicans.

The Old South still loves a strong man, even one like Donald Trump who couldn't care less about them.

This means that he could take the deepest parts of the South by biblical proportions in the general election.

Let's hope a Trump landslide there doesn't spark anything outside the immediate region. It should hopefully have as little influence as it deserves.