North Carolina Shrugs as Its Senator Scrutinizes Russia

SHELBY, N.C. — For all of the congressional hearings and cable coverage they have spawned, the government investigations into Russian interference in last year’s election do not readily come up in conversations at the Shelby Cafe.

Joyce Holcomb, who lives here in town, considered the topic in the crowded diner on Thursday morning. They have not found anything, she said between sips of coffee. And the fact that her senator, Richard M. Burr, a Republican, is the chairman of the Senate investigation does not change her opinion that it is all “a waste of time.”

“If there’s really something,” she said, “they need to find it and finish it up.”

It’s hard to find people in this southern area of North Carolina who are worked up by Russia’s meddling in the election or by the possibility that President Trump’s associates may have somehow been involved. When pressed, they will say it could be the biggest political crisis in decades or a smear campaign against the president, but with other, more pressing local issues on their minds, many North Carolinians are reserving their judgment — and their attention.

People around here are as short on details about Mr. Burr as they are on the investigation he leads — despite his 22 years in Congress, 12 of them in the Senate. It does not appear that his leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation will change that. And the highly publicized investigation won’t be helping, or hurting, Mr. Burr in the next election. Last year, Mr. Burr announced that he planned to leave politics at the end of his term, in 2022.

Mr. Burr prefers Rotary Club meetings to town hall forums. He dodges reporters and has kept a low profile over his career in Congress — such a low profile that he made fellow Republicans nervous last fall as his re-election race grew a little close for comfort. He won by fewer than six points, his smallest margin of victory since he first won his Senate seat in 2004 by 4.6 points.

Jim Morrill, a political reporter at The Charlotte Observer who has covered Mr. Burr since that first Senate race, described him as a candidate so unflashy he drives himself from one event to another, adding that he once produced a whiteboard from his trunk as a prop for one of his speeches.

“Most voters couldn’t tell you a whole lot about him,” Mr. Morrill said. “He’s got a high profile now with his committee and he just got re-elected, but I think most people would be hard-pressed to tell you anything specifically that he has put his stamp on over the years.”

As she waited for the train home in downtown Charlotte on Wednesday, Kristi Watanabe, 22, said she did not know much about Mr. Burr, including that he is in charge of an important Senate inquiry. “You know the name, and that’s about it,” she said with a shrug.

Whether residents hope investigators hurry for the sake of finding answers or eliminating distractions, many North Carolinians are not keeping close tabs on Mr. Burr or the investigation he is leading.

“Part of the problem is it’s mostly been debates about the process — who’s appointed, who’s getting fired,” said Ned Barnett, the editorial page editor at The News & Observer in Raleigh. “But there really hasn’t been much about where’s the ‘there’ there.”

There has been a lot of local competition for attention. In the past three months, North Carolina has seen the repeal of its so-called bathroom ban, reinstating protections for transgender people; a budget standoff between its Democratic governor and Republican Legislature; and the rejection of part of its redistricting plan by the Supreme Court because of racial bias.

On top of that is, as it is elsewhere in the country, the Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. According to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning research and advocacy group, about a million fewer North Carolinians would have health insurance if the law is repealed.

Local issues matter far more. “I think it takes some of the oxygen out of the room in terms of focus on that,” Mr. Barnett said.

Mr. Burr is not the first North Carolina senator to have found himself at the helm of a major investigation involving a sitting president. In 1973, Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., a Democrat who championed segregation and civil liberties, was asked to lead the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, known as the Watergate Committee.

His folksy charm, sharp questions and televised hearings propelled Mr. Ervin — a Harvard Law School graduate who called himself “just an ol’ country lawyer” — into the national spotlight. Raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains 40 miles north of Shelby, he dismissed any suggestion that he was out of step with North Carolinians, said Karl E. Campbell, a historian at Appalachian State University, who wrote a biography of Mr. Ervin.

Mr. Ervin would say, according to Mr. Campbell, “When I want to know what the people of North Carolina think, I go in a room and close the door and ask myself.”

But time-consuming investigations can put senators in a difficult spot with constituents because it diverts their focus from state interests.

“In North Carolina, there is a sense that a politician should rise to an occasion and be a statesman, and Ervin did,” Mr. Campbell said. “My sense is that people in North Carolina respect Burr for rising to the occasion, being a statesman.”

Mr. Burr’s decision not to run for re-election insulates him from any insinuation that he is grandstanding during the investigation. And he does not need to fear personal political damage if the inquiry turns up damaging evidence against anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign or in the White House.

North Carolina went for Mr. Trump, 49.8 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 46.2 percent. But an Elon University poll in April showed support for Mr. Trump dipping among North Carolina voters since Election Day, to 41.6 percent — in line with his 41 percent approval rating nationally at the time, according to Gallup.

“If Burr followed the evidence to the conclusion, people wouldn’t look at him differently,” said Mr. Morrill, the political reporter. “They would respect him for it.”