The presidential campaign in battleground North Carolina brought a former president from Arkansas and four Congress members from Florida to the Fayetteville area this weekend.
Former President Bill Clinton campaigned in Fayetteville on Friday and Saturday for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. On Friday evening, he appeared at an event for veterans and military families. On Saturday morning, he headlined an early voting party in Seabrook Park, which is next to a Cumberland County early voting site at Smith Recreation Center.
Clinton’s stops here were part of a campaign bus tour across eastern North Carolina.
About 250 attended Saturday, and some walked up the hill from the park to the rec center and voted after Clinton’s appearance.
Meanwhile, in Gray’s Creek on Saturday afternoon, Florida U.S. Reps. Cory Mills, Mike Waltz (not to be confused with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz), Brian Mast and Greg Steube had a meet-and-greet roundtable with about 50 people at the Paradise Acres restaurant to campaign for Republican former President Donald Trump. All are military veterans — three had service at Fort Bragg, which is now Fort Liberty.
Early voting started on Thursday in North Carolina and runs to Nov. 2. Voting by mail started in September.
As of Friday, more than 778,000 people — 10% of registered voters in North Carolina — had cast ballots so far, according to analysis by Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer. He said on X (formerly Twitter) that 10% of the state’s 7.7 million registered voters had voted.
Bill Clinton at Seabrook
“Sitting at home and not voting is voting for the other people,” Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin said as he wound up the crowd ahead of Clinton’s arrival. “So Fayetteville, this starts with us. If we overperform here in Cumberland County, southeastern North Carolina, this race is over. North Carolina goes to the Kamala Harris-Walz campaign.”
Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado followed and talked about ending gun violence.
Crow, a veteran who said his military career started in Fayetteville when he was an 82nd Airborne paratrooper stationed here, said the nation needs to push for responsible firearms ownership. He cited the more than 40,000 people who were killed by gunfire in the United States in 2023. His district is home to four well-known mass shootings, he said, including the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 and the Aurora movie theater shooting of 2012.
Then Clinton came on stage. His speech touched on history, immigration, Trump’s fitness for office, inflation, the Affordable Care Act and other top campaign topics.
“If you hire somebody to run the country, you want her to make it better, not to make you madder,” Clinton said. “So if you want it to be better, not madder, you got to be for Kamala Harris.”
Spectator April Finch of Fayetteville said she first voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, when she was 20. She was excited to see Bill Clinton.
“One thing is, I just respect him so much. Because I know that his era was filled with so much prosperity,” she said. “I can’t even state all of the positives, and the direction which this country was going at the time.”
Demetria Murphy of Fayetteville said she wants to see efforts to stop deaths from gun violence.
“This is how we mitigate it: By voting. Putting people in positions that align with what we believe works best for our communities in the overarching of the world,” Murphy said.
Shaun Lewis drove an hour and 15 minutes to Fayetteville from Holly Springs with her son, 12-year-old Noah. She had a faded “Clinton-Gore” T-shirt from the 1992 presidential campaign, and got a front-row spot well before Clinton arrived.
Fayetteville political pundit George Breece also brought a piece of memorabilia: A jacket from Clinton’s campaign bus tours in 1992. Breece said he traveled on two tours with Clinton and was one of the Democratic Party’s delegates for him.
Breece said Clinton remembered him. Clinton autographed the jacket and posed for a photo with Breece in front of the 2024 Harris tour bus.
Florida Congress members for Trump
In Gray’s Creek, Rep. Mike Waltz told CityView that Trump can win the election even if he loses North Carolina, but it will be harder for him to do so.
As a roundtable discussion got started, the members of Congress talked about their military service and took rhetorical shots at vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who has 24 years of military service and retired in May 2005. His unit was alerted of a deployment to Iraq in July 2005 and deployed in 2006, PBS and PoliticFact reported.
Republicans have criticized Walz for retiring before the deployment.
“All of us here actually carried weapons of war in actual wars,” unlike Walz, Waltz said.
Trump will support the military and veterans, Waltz said.
“We’re proud to be here as veterans … ” Waltz said. “And we say ‘Fort Bragg’ very deliberately. Because everyone I know that has served at Fort Bragg is very proud of that service.”
Trump has promised to change Fort Liberty’s name back to Fort Bragg.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress in the final days of the Trump administration voted to overturn Trump’s veto of a defense spending bill that included the plan to rename military bases that had been named in the 20th century to honor Confederate leaders.
Waltz was one of the lawmakers who voted to override Trump’s veto.
Mast and Steube voted to sustain Trump’s veto of the defense spending and name-change bill; Mills was not yet in office.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
Did you find this story useful or interesting? It was made possible by donations from readers like you to the CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so CityView can bring you more news and information like this.
