Chapel Hill, N.C. — TUESDAY is Primary Day in North Carolina, and while things like trade, immigration and the deficit will help people pick their candidate for president, there’s another issue that has an outsize impact on how the Tar Heel State votes: barbecue.

Year in and year out, the way a politician approaches the question of cooked meat determines how he fares at the polls. As Herbert O’Keefe, the editor of The Raleigh Times in the 1950s, once said, “No man has ever been elected governor of North Carolina without eating more barbecue than was good for him.”

In our state the linkage between politics and barbecue dates back at least to 1766, when the governor appointed by the king, William Tryon, tried to win the good will of citizens annoyed by the Stamp Act by laying on a barbecue in Wilmington. (It didn’t work: The local Sons of Liberty poured out the beer and threw the barbecued ox in the river. Note that this was a full seven years before the Boston Tea Party, which gets all the publicity.)

In more recent times, barbecue has even figured as a campaign issue. When a North Carolina secretary of state, Rufus Edmisten, ran for governor in 1984, he got in trouble with an offhand remark. “I’d be eating barbecue three times a day for a solid year,” he later recalled, “and I got up one night and, in a very, very lax moment — the devil made me do it — I made a horrible statement. I said, ‘I’m through with barbecue.’ Well, you would have thought I had made a speech against my mother, against apple pie, cherry pie, the whole mess.” He lost the election to a Republican (only the second one to be elected since Reconstruction).