NEWNow you can take heed to Fox Information articles!
Wandering about downtown Durham, North Carolina, the final couple of days, I stored making an attempt to determine what it jogged my memory of. Ultimately it got here to me, in some ways, this metropolis is a mini-San Francisco of the South, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s best chance to win the swing state.
Exterior the Metropolis by the Bay, I’ve by no means been anyplace the place Huge Tech’s footprint and cultural attitudes had been on such apparent show, and the 80% to twenty% benefit Democrats have had right here in current elections is simply one other signal of it.
Durham is a veritable millennial playground, the place the well-off younger tech execs of their infantile clothes and sneakers flit between trendy-looking eating places which might be basically high-end Applebee’s.
NORTH CAROLINA DEMOCRAT LEADER RESIGNS AFTER ARREST FOR ALLEGEDLY STEALING TRUMP ROADSIDE SIGNS
Within the morning, I overheard two of them chatting on the stroll to work.
The Outdated West Durham City signal celebrates “Range * Concord * Group.” (Matt Leach/Fox Digital)
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he requested. “I’m taking the gardening class,” she replied. “I signed up for the hike,” he shot again, and I’m pondering to myself, are these individuals going to an precise job, or to summer time camp?
Later that early night, a frazzled however professional-looking, 30-something South Asian man rushed over to the out of doors desk the place I used to be speaking to a neighborhood information reporter. He put a printed web page in entrance of us and insisted, “Are you native? Have you learnt the place any of this stuff are?”
I instructed him I had seen the statue of the purple penguin down the road earlier. “Thanks, thanks,” he stammered and ran off into the gloaming.
“That’s a grown man doing a scavenger hunt,” I instructed my companion, shaking my head.
My first day on the streets of Durham lined with rideshare scooters, I noticed no youngsters. The subsequent day, I noticed precisely two, and albeit, that’s surprisingly jarring.
The entire place feels vaguely like a facade, the earth tones and glass of mediocre trendy structure is swallowing up the outdated stone Artwork Deco buildings, and it is a place the place paying in money is at all times some type of a problem.
On a darker word, additionally like San Francisco, Durham has essentially the most aggressive homeless panhandlers I’ve ever seen in a small American metropolis.
After they aren’t demanding cash, you see them sleeping on benches, or in parks, and whereas not overwhelming, or harmful but, the seeds for which might be there.
A statue of college founder James E. Shepard is photographed in entrance of the North Carolina Central College campus in Durham, North Carolina. (North Carolina Central College)
All of that is to say that in Durham, I discovered what I imagine to be the prototypical Kamala Harris voters.
On this little bubble of privilege that jogs my memory of the village within the Nineteen Sixties TV present “The Prisoner,” a seemingly good place however in some way very faux, the Democrats’ imaginative and prescient of turning the whole country into San Francisco appears to be working.
Why wouldn’t a 34-year-old with no youngsters, pulling a buck fifty in an inexpensive state assist Harris and Democrats, particularly when the businesses that signal their fats paychecks, like Google, are the identical ones censoring “harmful” conservative speech day in and time out?
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
By all regular financial metrics, Durham is a implausible success story, however there are some issues with Huge Tech’s model of city improvement, with turning American cities into Silicon Valley campuses. A type of is that it doesn’t go away a lot room for the locals to thrive.
No person from right here is graduating from a group faculty and getting a non-service job at Epic Video games; like San Francisco, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is obvious and huge. However that appears positive to the contented cogs within the machine that gas Durham’s progress and Harris’s electoral possibilities.
Right here in Durham, the corporate will handle you, simply as Momala Harris says she is going to if elected. It’s a creepy feeling, like the one individualism current is within the alternative of fancy footwear and purses. The town has all of the soul of synthetic intelligence.
San Francisco and Durham are the locations the place Harris and Democrats thrive, the place the top-down group of society by firms and the state plots out your nice life for you, as you grind out code and reward your self with avocado toast.
Why wouldn’t a 34-year-old with no youngsters, pulling a buck fifty in an inexpensive state assist Harris and Democrats, particularly when the businesses that signal their fats paychecks, like Google, are the identical ones censoring “harmful” conservative speech day in and time out?
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
However for a lot of Democratic voters, particularly millennials, it isn’t such a nasty deal. They suppose that is the long run, a childless arrested improvement of firm hikes and scavenger hunts and ignoring the homeless.
If sufficient of them prove for Harris in early November, it may very well be the big-tech way forward for all of us.
