On a sunny, pleasantly mild, mid-August morning outside the John M. Brown Community Center, in Apex, the sound of a passing train mixes with the clatter of cicadas.
Apex sits on the western edge of Wake County, alongside other tidy bedroom communities surrounding the capital city of Raleigh — places like Cary, Morrisville and Holly Springs.
Miriam Sandoval Moore, 84, came by the community center on this morning to have some coffee and conversation with her friend, Ada Vazquez, whom she’d bumped into at church.
“I do my daily mass,” Moore said.
Moore, who emigrated from Nicaragua at the age of six, has lived in Apex for 15 years, enjoying what she calls her “bonus years.”
Moore is registered unaffiliated and said she’s undecided about many political contests this year, except the presidential race between former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat.
“I definitely will go with the Democratic Party,” Moore said.
‘Totalitarian countries control the press,’ voter says
Vazquez said she’s leaning the same way. Vazquez, 77, fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1965, during the exodus known as the Camarioca Boatlift. She said she knows what it’s like to live under an oppressive regime.
“Totalitarian countries control the press, radio, tv, newspaper,” Vazquez said. “I lived that.”
Jude Ying, 77, also stopped by the community center in Apex with a friend. Ying lives with his son, daughter-in-law, and their three children.
Originally from Shanghai, China, Ying — like Vazquez — said he grew up under totalitarian rule. Ying also said that’s what worries him about another Trump presidency, referring to a cavalier comment the former president made about being a dictator only on “day one.”
“I come from communist China, so I know how difficult it is,” Ying said.
Southern border situation is ‘scary’, GOP voter says
But Democrats and lax immigration policy pose a greater danger to this country, says Dolores Keith, 83, who said she comes to the community center for social engagement, playing dominoes, cards and other games.
“I tried pickle ball, but when I saw three accidents and women being carried away by an ambulance, I said, ‘God’s trying to tell me this is not the sport for you,’ even though I loved it,” Keith said.
A registered Republican voter, Keith moved to North Carolina from Staten Island, New York, to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren.
“I mean, how can anybody who has a brain say it’s okay to just let people pour into the country, not know where they are, who they are, what are they here for?” Keith wondered. “How come that’s not scary for everybody?”
Suburban voters could have ‘huge consequences’
North Carolina’s suburbs — places like Cornelius, near Charlotte, and Kernersville, near Winston-Salem — are marked by expanding blocs of unaffiliated voters and are much more competitive than the state’s solidly blue cities and red rural areas, according to Michael Bitzer, who teaches politics and history at Catawba College, and is the author of Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battlelines in the Tar Heel State.
Bitzer pointed out that in 2016, Trump and Hillary Clinton basically split North Carolina’s suburban vote. And while Trump won those areas by a wider margin in 2020, Bitzer noted that the Republican candidate for governor that year, Dan Forest, edged eventual winner Roy Cooper by only 2% in the suburbs.
“I think we’re talking about, for November, small slivers of the electorate that will have potentially huge consequences,” Bitzer said.
In Morrisville on a serene Saturday, people check out the stalls at the Western Wake Farmers’ Market amid the sounds of a singer playing guitar and vendors selling produce and fresh bread.
Peter Harrold was there with his girlfriend’s dog, Duke, a rescue that Harrold said is “six or seven-ish.”
Harrold is tall, fit and sports a beard that would make any lumberjack, or hipster, proud. He’s a former hockey player and works in player development for the Carolina Hurricanes.
Registered unaffiliated, Harrold said when it comes to politics people need to do a better job of talking, and listening, to each other.
“I think the vast majority of people are in the middle and we have people on both ends of the extreme pulling sane, rational people in opposite directions,” Harrold said.
Harrold described himself as disillusioned with politics but said that doesn’t mean he won’t vote this year.
“Disengagement is not the answer, I think,” Harrold said, adding that “a more rational” engagement is what the state of politics in this country needs.
“I think grown adults can disagree how best to run a country,” Harrold said. But he added there are certain things up for debate now that he always thought all people could agree on.
“Peaceful transfer of power, that kind of stuff, I really didn’t think was going to be something in my lifetime that was going to be an issue,” Harrold said.
Erin Gambee and her husband, Talon, visited the farmers market and came away with some lettuce, tomatoes, eggplant, green beans and basil.
The Gambees are in their late 20s. They described themselves as “outdoorsy” and moved to North Carolina from Georgia about a year ago, lured by the state’s hiking and beach-going opportunities.
Both registered unaffiliated voters, the young couple recently upgraded from an apartment in Cary to a house in Morrisville.
Erin Gambee said abortion access is a big election issue for her.
“Legislators who do not understand health care making decisions about health care means that doctors can’t do their jobs and that hurts all of women’s health care,” she argued.
Cary voter bemoans the ‘lying and untruths’
Talking about reproductive rights and motherhood sparks intense emotions for Niki Scoggins, who was visiting Cary’s Fred Bond Metro Park with two of her three sons. Her boys, 12 and 17, were carrying rods, tackle boxes and a container of worms.
“Those are my two youngest and they love to fish,” she said.
Bond Park is sprawling with trails, fields, ballfields and a lake. Scoggins, nearing the age of 50, lives in nearby Holly Springs.
She had her oldest son, who’s 31, when she was 18. Having been a young mother seems to have shaped her views on abortion access, which are decidedly pro-choice.
“So, you want to push your beliefs on other people and still treat them like second-class citizens?” she asked rhetorically. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
But abortion is a fraught topic for Bob Rzeszutek, who came to Bond Park to walk his 9-month-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Pepper. Rzeszutek, 67, is a pharmaceutical industry retiree, and lives in Cary. He was raised Catholic, in Massachusetts, but has lived in North Carolina for more than 20 years.
His conflicted feelings about abortion notwithstanding, other issues have him leaning towards Democrats in this year’s elections.
Rzeszutek, who is registered unaffiliated and has voted for Republicans in the past, said he does not want to see a repeat of the first Trump term with what he described as “all the chaos and the craziness that went on in there.”
“There’s been too much lying and untruths,” Rzeszutek added, to explain his position with this year’s election just over 60 days away.
This story is part of a series, Voter Voices, that looks at how voters view key issues in important electoral locations across North Carolina.
