A poll shows that Republican Governor Pat McCrory has surged 9 points since he stood up against President Barack Obama’s order to allow transgenders into K-12 restrooms, and he has now converted a 10-point deficit into a 5-point lead in his 2016 reelection campaign against Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
“The shift we’ve seen since last month’s poll shows that, along with the continued strength of the state’s economy, Governor McCrory has re-taken the lead on the narrative of HB2,” said Francis De Luca, president of Civitas Institute, which conducted the poll of 600 likely voters.
The poll showed that McCrory gained 9 points, while Cooper lost 6 points, compared to the mid-April Civitas poll. That’s a 15-point swing in one month.
McCrory is now leading the 2016 race by 45 percent to 40 percent. In April, he was losing to Cooper by 36 percent to 46 percent.
The poll suggests that Democrats will lose President Barack Obama recently nationalized the issue with his May 9 executive order requiring 55 million K-12 kids to share their bathrooms with a small number of self-identified transgenders.
North Carolina’s privacy and safety law, which was numbered HB2, was passed in March after the city of Charlotte passed a pro-transgender law that allowed men to legally use women’s bathrooms. The state law that is being supported by McCrory requires people to use the public bathrooms that match their legal sex. The state law protects the sexual privacy of women and men in public bathrooms, while also allowing transgender people to change their legal sex once they undergo medical procedures.
The privacy and safety law has aroused shrieking opposition from progressives in gay advocacy groups, Hollywood and the Justice Department because it reinforces civic support for the idea of two different-but-complementary sexes. Progressives, in contrast, want to advance the claim that a person’s chosen “gender identity” is legally and socially more important than their anatomical male or female sex. For example, Obama’s acting assistant attorney general for civil rights insisted May 9 that biological men become legal women when they live, study and work as women.
McCrory’s gain is a loss for pollsters who expected his support for the popular HB2 would hurt him politically.
Under an April 25 headline “HB2 Deeply Unpopular in North Carolina,” the Democratic-leaning president of Public Policy Polling asserted that McCrory’s support of HB2 may have “closed the door on any chance Pat McCrory had” of regaining supporters from 2012. That claim rested on their polling question showing that “HB2” was supposedly opposed by 36 percent to 45 percent. In fact, the firm that previously compared Donald Trump to lice and cockroaches, could not have been more wrong.
In contrast, polling firms that described the details of what the law does showed overwhelming support for McCrory’s position of keeping transgender men out of women’s rooms until they undergo surgery — by a huge 61 percent to 29 percent margin in the Civitas poll.
Even the Civitas poll April 25 poll, which showed McCrory trailing Cooper, also showed that North Carolinians overwhelmingly opposed to transgender support in schools by roughly 10 to 1, or by 72 percent strong opposition to 7 percent strong support.
A recent Rasmussen national poll of 1,000 adults showed that 65 percent of adults want the transgender issue to be decided by state and local governments, not by the federal government.
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