A TAPster who has watched North Carolina’s growth and change for decades offers this analysis:

Apple’s arrival at RTP will be the most transformative event in the state’s political history. Period.

No kidding, this is a generational political game changer.

There have been other transformational events in the state, but nothing like Apple. Banks and the NBA were micro-transformations for Charlotte. The life cycles of the tobacco/furniture/textile industries were economic transformations, and stimulated public policy decisions to support their growth.

In the 1980s, IBM had a chance at political transformation as it dominated the RTP landscape, importing thousands of employees from around the world who brought their taste in politics, food and lifestyle and turned rural crossroads into busy cities. IBM could’ve done anything, but it didn’t see the need to dabble in state-level politics and never flexed its muscles.

Apple will be different, and will make a difference.

The company’s RTP operation will have a sophisticated management, and its workforce will be intelligent, well-paid and look like the diverse world it serves. Apple is a trillion-dollar giant because its people are progressive, open-minded, forward-looking people who think about where the world is going and how they can create products a new world will need. They embrace change and diversity and are always many steps ahead of the game.

These Appleites will be within glaring and snarling distance of a state capital currently bogged down by closed-minded, manipulative racists whose vision of our state’s future is shaped by their country bumpkin constituents.

Apple and its people will not share nor tolerate such a vision.

And they will change it.