SILER CITY, N.C. (news agencies) — At the epicenter of President Joe Biden’s promised economic boom, a slow tractor can still halt traffic.
Just 81,000 people live in rural Chatham County, North Carolina. There are 1,076 farms. The old mill now houses a dance studio, a grocer and a steakhouse. For work, many people have no choice but to commute to nearby Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
But after years of careful planning, Chatham County has started to change.
The new Wolfspeed factory — six football fields long — overlooks I-64 and will soon produce advanced wafers for computer chips. Automaker Vinfast is scheduled to open a factory as well. Both projects stem in large part from incentives that Biden signed into law.
Developers, including the Walt Disney Corp., plan to build several thousand new homes.
“When the right opportunity came along, we were there and we were ready,” said Greg Lewis, who owns the steakhouse. “It is growth, growth, growth.”
That same economic story is being replicated in a number of other critical battleground states, including Arizona and Georgia.
But while the kind of enthusiasm voiced by Lewis would usually mean a strong tailwind for an incumbent president, so far this election year there is little evidence from polling that Americans are giving Biden credit for the gains as voters still focus instead on inflation still climbing at 3.4% annually.
Places like Chatham County show how this year’s presidential campaign offers two conflicting visions for America’s economic future.
Voters face a decades-defining choice about what can do more for growth: former President Donald Trump’s preference for tax cuts skewed toward business and the wealthy or the targeted government investments backed by Biden as well as possible tax increases to fund programs for the middle class.
The county backed Biden over Trump in 2020 but sits in the solidly Republican congressional district of Rep. Richard Hudson. He voted against the Democratic president’s policies and his office declined to answer questions about whether the investments in his district are a positive.
Just how much the influx of federal and private sector money affects the political dynamics in North Carolina and beyond will have a lot to say about who will win November’s presidential election.
Biden is campaigning on how his policies have helped pump hundreds of billions of dollars in private and federal investment into companies, helping to revive the faded computer chip sector and pioneer newer technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels and artificial intelligence. But so far, the investments have not significantly swayed the public.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, maintains that Biden’s ideas would wreck the economy and that EVs will flop against a proven fuel such as gasoline. He says corporate tax cuts would do more to bolster growth by letting companies choose their own path, and a threat of higher tariffs would cause them to keep their factory jobs inside the United States.
“Would everybody like to buy an electric car?” Trump asked at a recent rally, where he was met with a chorus of “No!”
When Biden spoke at Wolfspeed’s headquarters in Durham last year, he described its chips as not just powering the economy but protecting it from supply chain disruptions and competition from China.
“It’s a game changer,” he said. “We’re turning things around in a big way.”
The new Wolfspeed factory has begun installing its industrial furnaces that heat to half of the sun’s temperatures. The factory is prepared to start production by the end of the year, while many of the other announced government incentives around the country are still blueprints or in the construction phase.
Pending administration approval, the company may receive support through tax credits from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It also has applied for funding through the Commerce Department as part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.
Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe said the potential for government support has been “very important” as the company has sought to produce more silicon carbide, a material that increases the efficiency of computer chips. He said the material will “lead to one of the most important transitions in the history of semiconductors,” allowing EVs, solar panels, data centers and other technologies such as energy storage to work better.
