North Carolina Is in Play

The state’s unexpectedly quick shift in Harris’s direction opens a new front in the campaign with huge opportunities for the Democrats.

Photo courtesy of Bloomberg

For most of this election, the Tar Heel State looked like a reach for Democrats. Even with an unpopular radical—the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Mark Robinson—at the top of the state level ticket, Donald Trump led Joe Biden consistently by several points in the polls there.

But Harris’s entry into the race on July 21 has been moving the numbers, particularly among women, minorities and younger voters who were lukewarm on Biden. The shift has been so dramatic that yesterday the Cook Political Report officially moved the state from “Lean Republican” to “Toss-Up.” 

To cause even more ketchup-meet-wall moments, a Fox Network poll out yesterday also has the race a dead heat, with Trump at 50 percent and Harris at 49, well within the three point margin of error, and the New York Times has Harris leading Trump 49 to 47.

The new toss-up status for North Carolina led me to want to explore three questions a bit more in depth. First, just how “purple” has the state been in past presidential elections? Second, where does Harris see possibility and what strategy is her campaign running? And third, what would happen to electoral math if she actually flipped it?

North Carolina is a swing state

Because it’s part of the South and has voted for the Republican presidential candidate for the last three election cycles, it’s common to think of North Carolina as a deeply red state. But a closer look reveals that it’s actually quite purple.

Many forget that Barack Obama actually won North Carolina in 2008, when his historic candidacy and outreach to new voters drove up Black turnout throughout the state. As analyst Steve Kornacki noted, Obama won 17 key counties with Black populations of more than 35 percent, and he did so by a margin of 15.5 points overall. That was 4.3 points more than Biden won those counties in 2020, when he posted aggregate wins there of around 11.2 points. 

That might not sound like much, but it was just enough to tip the state to Obama in 2008, who won in a squeaker by just 0.32 points, while Biden lost it narrowly in 2020 by 1.34 points. Added up, that’s a shift of just 1.66 percentage points toward the Republicans in 12 years. Harris believes she can outperform Biden by at least that much in 2024.

Here’s another point to consider: When voting for the top office statewide, North Carolinians routinely vote for the Democratic candidate. Indeed, since 1993, the GOP candidate has only won the governor’s race once. In 2024, the GOP candidate is trailing by double digits in the polls, and voters who are determined to keep out extremist MAGA officials may turn up in large numbers to vote against Robinson. That could have a substantial spillover effect for the presidential race.

Where the voters are

To repeat Obama’s 2008 success in North Carolina, Harris will first need to run up high numbers in the cities and suburbs, which have already seen demographic changes favorable to her. According to Kornacki, there are seven urban areas where the margins for Democrats have moved more than five points toward the Democrats in the period from 2008 to 2020: Greensboro, Chapel Hill, Durham, Asheville, Charlotte and its suburbs, and Raleigh. Mirroring the rest of the country, these areas boast denser populations and large numbers of both Black voters and white voters with college degrees.

Harris will be looking to close the 2020 presidential vote gap of 74,483 votes, hoping that four more years of positive demographic trends will help do the trick. But she isn’t focused solely on the Democratic strongholds. She knows that the GOP has solidified its rural base during the same time period, but she is hoping to chip away at the margins by which Trump will carry those counties.

North Carolina is the most rural of the swing states. Around a third of the state’s some 10 million residents live in rural areas, more than in any other state besides Texas. The New York Times recently went out to Wilson County, 50 miles east of Raleigh, to interview some 30 rural voters. It found that many believe both parties have abandoned them, but that there is a new excitement level for Harris, particularly among the county’s 40 percent Black residents, and that the voters are exhausted by the national politics of division.

That could provide an opening for the Harris campaign, which is running on an inclusive and positive message that promises to move on from the divisions of the past. If the Trump campaign continues to offer the white residents of rural North Carolina little more than grievance, fear and anger, it risks losing enthusiasm and therefore key support among its base of rural voters.

But the Harris campaign is doing more than just talking about reaching these voters. In neighboring Georgia, the campaign is already running the playbook of Sen. Raphael Warnock, whose winning 2022 strategy was not only to score big in Atlanta but to work hard to lose by less in other parts of the state. Principal deputy Harris campaign manager Quentin Fulks is himself a rural Georgia native, and he is looking to replicate that strategy in North Carolina.

“You have to really stave down margins and go places even when you don’t think you can win it outright,” Fulks told Politico. “You know you’re going to lose that county, but just showing up there can sometimes be the difference between 5 to 10 percentage points, or sometimes just putting an office there.”

The Harris campaign has been investing into rural southern counties, and it has even set up seven offices with 50 staff members in south Georgia alone. On policy questions, Harris has emphasized the need for rural broadband and sought to reach those ignored by federal programs, especially among rural minority communities. And she’s currently on a bus tour through rural southern Georgia, which will not only energize her campaign among Black voters there but also send a message to rural voters everywhere: She and her running mate Tim Walz, who has strong rural bona fides, are truly out there in the rural communities, even while Trump continues to play golf and not really care about them.

North Carolina would change the electoral map entirely 

By putting the southern states of Georgia and North Carolina into play, the number of possible paths to 270 Electoral College votes grows considerably for Harris. For today’s purposes, I’ll focus on what a win in North Carolina does to the map.

Harris is already looking strong in the Midwestern blue wall states of Wisconsin and Michigan, where she has moved the polls considerably in her favor. Were she to win those two states plus North Carolina, look at where it puts her:

That’s right: She’d have 267 Electoral College votes, all other things being equal. That means she would only need one other swing state—Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia or Nevada—to win the presidency. 

Another way to look at this is this: If she is winning North Carolina, there’s a good chance she is also winning Georgia and the other Sun Belt states. If she sweeps the Sun Belt States, she doesn’t even need any of the blue wall states to win:

The Trump campaign is now playing defense, hoping not to see North Carolina and Georgia slip from its grasp. 

In 2020, when Biden unexpectedly won both Arizona and Georgia, it made it nearly impossible for Trump to cobble together a win, even if it managed to knock out the electoral votes of one or more of the swing states through illegal or fraudulent means. If polls continue to improve for Harris and she winds up taking key states like North Carolina, Trump will face a similarly irrefutable electoral wall in 2024.

I’m not here to present the South with rose colored glasses. There is much work to do and a tough fight ahead, and the GOP has had over a decade to entrench itself with voters in rural southern counties. But Harris is, by any objective measure, well positioned to pull out a win in North Carolina. And when we talk about a possible resounding electoral win for Harris—one that could reshape our politics for a generation—it usually involves her holding Georgia and possibly flipping North Carolina. Somewhat to my own amazement, I would already put the chances of the latter happening at even money today—and Harris has only just begun her push.