- Associated Press - Saturday, October 22, 2016

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Burdened by worries and resting on a bench at the North Carolina State Fair, Richard Blackmon described his impending layoff from a job assembling heavy construction equipment at a time when his state’s economy is supposedly recovering.

“The economy is not coming back, said Blackmon, 52, as nearby vendors sold old-timey items like scrimshaw jewelry and rag dolls. “We’re not selling the product that I build and they’re telling (us) that they’re going to have to start laying off.”

How the economy feels to Blackmon helps explain why many middle-class voters haven’t embraced a centerpiece of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s re-election campaign. Since his first year in office, the governor has repeatedly said he’s helped spark an economic recovery in North Carolina

But out of nearly a dozen people interviewed Wednesday at the State Fair, including those who said they plan to back McCrory, only one said the economy feels like it’s on the right track.

North Carolina had ranked highly as an attractive business location for years before McCrory took office. Conservative money-management earned North Carolina a top credit rating it’s held for decades.

But the Great Recession pushed the unemployment rate above 11 percent three years before McCrory’s 2012 election. The jobless rate was 9 percent the month McCrory won. By last August it had dropped to almost half that rate, lower than the national average. But nearly half the states had even lower jobless rates.

McCrory’s challenge is to persuade voters that North Carolina’s improving economy is better than the slow, lengthy national recovery that started in 2009.

McCrory’s budget director, Andrew Heath, believes tax cuts and spending restraint helped boost state economic growth, though he admits it’s hard to measure the impact of individual GOP-led changes.

“In terms of isolating specific policies, or a tax cut in Year One went to job growth in Year Two, I don’t know that we are equipped to do that,” Heath told an audience at a conservative think tank in August. But “we are still in a comeback.”

Economic data show:

- By the first quarter of this year, North Carolina’s overall economic activity had improved faster than the Southeast or national averages since McCrory took office. But through June, per-capita personal income growth has been middling - ranking 22nd and trailing Southeast neighbors Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

- The number of jobs added since McCrory took office increased by more than 300,000 - much faster than the number of new workers who’ve entered the workforce. The broadest measure of unemployment, which counts the underemployed and the discouraged, shows North Carolina went from one of the country’s worst in 2012 to around the middle of the pack, better than Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.

McCrory twice canceled scheduled interviews with The Associated Press to discuss the economy and other campaign issues. His re-election campaign cited the governor’s ongoing response to Hurricane Matthew.

The much-improved unemployment rate was a top administration achievement because the state’s manufacturing- and construction-heavy economy suffered more than most, Commerce Secretary John Skvarla said in an interview.

“We have passed almost everybody in the pack in the last 3 1/2 years. But we had more to make up than the nation did,” he said.

McCrory’s boasts about an improving economy have also been obscured by the attention focused on House Bill 2.

The state law passed in March blocks many anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual people. Businesses responded by boycotting North Carolina and even reversing decisions to open operations in the state. McCrory has been an outspoken proponent for the law.

Several fair-goers spoke unprompted about the law’s financial impact. One was Nicholas Jones, who wore a sky-blue T-shirt with the logo of his beloved University of North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team.

“We’ve lost a lot of money over the last, what, six months, with that new law,” said Jones, 45, of Raleigh. “We can’t lose jobs. We don’t have jobs to lose in the first place.”

Meanwhile, Realtor Tracy Shumack plans to vote for McCrory and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump because she trusts they’ll do more to improve the economy. She and her husband were both jobless on Election Day four years ago, part of an 18-month stint when they struggled without incomes.

They uprooted from their Wilson home in eastern North Carolina for the bigger city of Winston-Salem. Now she’s slowly selling real estate again and they’ve launched a new business selling a trailer-hitch carrier he devised for people who want to disconnect the side doors on their Jeep Wrangler and carry them along.

“The economy is trying to grow. It takes some time to fix problems that were already here,” she said in a phone interview. “I wouldn’t say that they are a whole lot better yet, but they are at least steady.”

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Follow Emery P. Dalesio at https://twitter.com/emerydalesio. His work can be found at https://bigstory.ap.org/content/emery-p-dalesio.

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