NBC to feature Anson throughout 2022 election coverage

WADESBORO — Anson County will be a focus of year-long NBC News and “Meet the Press” project called County to County which aims to provide deeper context to the 2022 mid-term elections through the lens of specific communities across the country that are representative of larger voting blocks.

As part of the project, which NBC began in the lead-up to the 2020 election, NBC News Correspondent Antonia Hylton will be embedding within the Anson County community to get a sense of how national issues resonate locally. Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” said that Hylton will be coming to the county multiple times a month, and will be publishing stories throughout her time here.

Other counties that will be included in the project this election cycle are Chattooga County, GA; Luzerne County, PA; Delaware County, OH; Duval County, FL; Washoe County, NV; and Dane County, WI.

Last election, Todd said their reporters sought to use that group of counties to gain insight into the question of whether or not President Donald Trump could maintain his support all the way through to election day. On election night, Todd watched North Carolina’s results closely and noted trends that he felt could be part of a larger shift in the country politically which would see the Sun Belt and the Black Belt take more of a center stage than the midwest.

His team doesn’t see Anson as a representative of North Carolina, but rather emblematic of a specific type of voter: rural African Americans, being a rural community that is about 49% Black based on the 2020 Census. With this mid-term, Todd wants to test the hypothesis that Democrats are losing rural African American voters nationwide, showing a divide between urban and rural African Americans that he believes could be a factor in a relatively evenly split state like North Carolina going for Republicans every presidential election since President Barack Obama’s first term.

“When you look at why Democrats seem to have come up just short in North Carolina over the last decade … our theory is that it has something to do with the rural African American vote,” Todd said in an interview last week.

In order to get a read on the political situation in Anson County, Todd said that Hylton will focus on going to public meetings of local government bodies, as well as meet with faith and community leaders, rather than on following social media squabbles. With school board meetings becoming battlegrounds for heated debates over vaccines and Critical Race Theory over recent months — an issue which Hylton has been reporting on for some time — this setting will be key in watching how these national issues play out locally.

“One of the things that’s happened — and I don’t think it’s a good development in America — is that all politics has been nationalized,” Todd said, adding that it’s been strange to witness arguments in small towns that use language that gets thrown around in Congress.

An example of the coverage residents could expect to see about Anson County would be one that deals with how the county is recovering from the pandemic-induced economic downturn, according to Todd. He added that the coverage will also focus on the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina as it relates to Anson County.

“Our hope — and this is what has happened in our 5 counties previously, at least in the smaller counties — is that our reporters really became well-known among their group of community touchstones,” he said.