When it comes to the presidency, voters in North Carolina value innovation over experience — according to a recent poll by High Point University.
Among registered N.C. voters, the poll found 51 percent of respondents said they would favor a presidential candidate with new ideas over a candidate with more political experience.
This tendency is especially evident in the Republican Party primary, where neither Ben Carson nor Donald Trump have held political office or had experience in the field.
Martin Kifer, a political science professor at HPU who directed the poll, cited frustration with politicians as a rationale for the poll's results.
“We see that in polling all the time, people giving low approval ratings to elected officials, people who don’t have a whole lot of confidence in government, that kind of thing," Kifer said.
Discontent with elected officials is not a new phenomenon, and job approval ratings for U.S. Congress have declined from its peak at 84 percent in October 2001 to 11 percent in November 2015.
Kifer said candidates in the presidential election are focusing on how they can bring new ideas to the White House in order to play into these frustrations.
“People want to project confidence on issues and they also want to cast themselves as something different often than what’s going on in Washington, D.C. and that happens with some frequency," he said.
Ferrel Guillory, a UNC journalism professor and director of the Program on Public Life, said he also sees voters' political frustration as a reason for the success of non-politicians in this campaign.
