and othersAndon Simonini was stuck in artificial traffic in the middle of a Charlotte highway at 2:30 p.m. as drivers waited for Kamala Harris’ plane to land and her motorcade to depart for the day’s rally.
He had gotten out of his car because there was no reason not to. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. His red “Make America Great Again” hat made him stand out among the crowd cursing the traffic gods.
Simonini, who was born and raised in Charlotte and is building a home, relies in part on the city’s incredible growth for his livelihood. But not all growth is great, he says.
“This is a traditionally Southern state,” Simonini said. “We’re seeing over 100 people a day moving to Charlotte. It’s changing the electoral map. I was born and raised in Charlotte and have lived here for 33 years. I’ve lived here all my life. I went to University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This is my city. It’s a conservative city. And I want to keep it that way.”
But North Carolina is now at stake in America’s tense 2024 presidential election, rejoining the list of key battleground states where voters will decide whether Harris becomes America’s first woman of color to win the White House, or whether Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office after four years of political chaos.
About two months ago, the odds didn’t look this way.
North Carolina has had close presidential races for decades, but Obama won by 0.3 percentage points in 2008, becoming the last Democratic candidate to win the state since 1976. Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to put him at a disadvantage in North Carolina; every poll through June had Trump trailing the president by at least 2 points, with the average being about 6 points.
Party affiliation doesn’t say much in a state with a long history of split voting: Nearly 4 in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million voters choose not to belong to a party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new voters in North Carolina, while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters.
Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes — about 1.3 percentage points, the closest he came to winning the state — in 2020. Biden won four states by narrow margins: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Mr Biden’s withdrawal and Ms Harris’s rise have muddied the calculations, with North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall describing the reaction as “euphoric.”
“It stands in stark contrast to the venom, the poison and the hatred that emanates from Republican events,” she said, “and in stark contrast to the hope and excitement for the future that emanates from Democratic events.”
The Trump campaign recently reportedly abandoned efforts to mount a full campaign in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia, leaving seven political battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
From our perspective, we feel like the race is a 50-50 race, but we still feel like we have an advantage.
North Carolina Republican Matt Mercer
Counting the electoral votes excluding the remaining non-battleground states, Harris has 226 to Trump’s 219. North Carolina can award the winner 16 electoral votes. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidential election. Of the remaining battleground states, only Pennsylvania has more electoral votes than Harris.
Polling data shows that Democratic voters are re-energized and the state is now tied, in part because about 20% of North Carolinians are black, and increased African-American voter turnout helped power Mr. Obama’s victory there in 2008.
But the enthusiasm is much broader, as was evident this week when Ms. Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies, one in Charlotte and one a few hours later in Greensboro, the vice president’s 17th visit to North Carolina and his ninth this year alone.
If Harris wins in North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, she will only need to win one of the other four battleground states to win the presidential election. However, if Trump wins in North Carolina, he can win the presidential election even if he loses in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which have more electoral votes, by winning in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
MaElisa Benton was waiting outside the Greensboro Coliseum on one leg Tuesday night for traffic to clear, her right knee on a scooter to keep her broken ankle from hitting the ground. She said she had come from Charlotte for the event.
Benton is a transplant from the Atlanta area who left Georgia frustrated with how her community changed as she grew up, an irony she sees.
Local residents have complained about the rising cost of living, with rising housing costs being a top concern: Even those who survived the slow collapse of the furniture industry over the past three decades are now shouldering higher property taxes as home prices rise.
“Whenever I meet someone who’s a native Charlottean, I always say, ‘Look, I’ve been in your situation,'” Benton says. “I plan to be an upstanding citizen, because I know what it’s like to be a newcomer.” She has a keen eye for the city’s issues, services and infrastructure, “but we also have to keep Charlotte Charlotte, and some of the bigger cities have forgotten that.”
Affordable housing is a crisis in Charlotte, as it is in Atlanta and Greensboro and most big U.S. cities. But in North Carolina, this isn’t just a city problem. Lenoir (pronounced “Len-OR”), located on the edge of the Brushy Mountains of the Appalachians, is one of the state’s 73 rural counties that also has a problem with market-rate housing. About a third of North Carolina’s voters live in rural counties.
Democrats have a field office in Lenoir; Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson held a campaign event there on Wednesday for his gubernatorial campaign; Secretary of State Marshall debated there last week. Today, no part of the state is safe from battleground politics.
Democrats have long expected a tough fight in North Carolina and have poured time, money and personnel into the state over the past year.
“Democrats are certainly trying to reach young people,” Marshall said, and are working hard to connect with young women who might be interested in abortion policy. “They’re the ones who go to Sunday school, they’re the ones who work, they’re the ones who feed their kids. They’re suburban moms, working professionals.”
It’s no coincidence that Harris’ first post-debate visit to North Carolina to hold a rally is that important. Trump is holding a rally in Wilmington, on the North Carolina coast, next week. His running mate, J.D. Vance, is in Raleigh next week, too. The Republican campaign regularly sends surrogates to local events. In two weeks, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson is scheduled to speak at the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Salt and Light conference.
Democratic campaign officials say there are 26 North Carolina chapters with 240 paid staff members. The selection of some chapters, such as rural Wilson County in the state’s Black Belt and Lenoir in the mountainous west, signals a shift away from a focus on densely populated urban areas that favor Democrats.
Democrats are also using their significant financial advantage in fundraising to blanket broadcast and social media with ads for Harris, which organizers say have been running for a year. Ad-tracking firm AdImpact says Democrats have about $50 million in ad spending set aside by the end of the election cycle, with a particular focus on Black and Spanish-speaking media. Trump only began advertising in earnest in August.
But Republican campaign leaders see many of these efforts as contrived.
“From where we stand, this is a 50-50 race, but we feel like we still have the advantage,” said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina Republican Party. “One of the big reasons is our leadership. You know, we didn’t abandon the ground work at any level in 2020. What we’re seeing from Democrats is a catch-up effort.”
The Republican campaign is decentralized, covering a wide area in a state that stretches 360 miles from Manteo in the east to Murphy in the west, Mercer said. “To win statewide, we have to go across the state, and that means going west of Interstate 77 and east of Interstate 95.”
“You have people moving to Charlotte and Raleigh, you have retired couples moving to the coast, you have military people who have decided to stay in the state,” Mercer said. “I think Democrats are falling into the trap of thinking that all of the growth is going to benefit them, and they’re just missing the point.”
North Carolina’s legislature is Republican-controlled, and the state has enough Republicans to override a gubernatorial veto, but North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper is a Democrat, and the state has elected Democratic governors for most of the past three decades while Republican presidents have won.
Josh Stein, the North Carolina attorney general and Democratic candidate to succeed Cooper, has held a consistent lead throughout the year over Robinson, an unusually controversial candidate even by Trump-era standards, with a string of aggressive, anti-Semitic attacks on social media and in public comments.
Robinson has kept a low profile in recent months, while Stein has used her financial resources to attack Robinson with ads that are based largely on the lieutenant governor’s own words. In recent weeks, Robinson has been on the campaign trail, meeting with small groups in remote towns and blasting the media and calling Stein’s ads deceptive. “Josh Stein is a liar,” she said, urging reporters to take that message to her opponent and calling for a debate.
Stein has declined for now.
JAmes Adamakis watched Robinson speak on Tuesday at Countryside Barbecue in the small town of Marion, N.C., a popular stop for politicians who live in the state’s rural mountains. A photo of Barack Obama’s 2011 visit hangs proudly on the wall next to the cash register.
Adamakis, a military veteran who works in juvenile justice, said he supports tougher-on-crime Republicans, but acknowledged that even people who share his political values can vote oddly in North Carolina.
Adamakis recounted how one of his friends switched to the Republican Party. “It was because of the economy. He kept buying groceries and stuff while inflation was going on,” Adamakis said. “He wondered why the media and Biden were saying it was good, but it wasn’t. I think the economy is an issue that crosses borders.”
“Everybody you meet in Western North Carolina might still vote Democrat, but they still don’t like it.”
But in North Carolina, political diversity isn’t just about race. The economies of places like Research Triangle Park near Durham are radically different from Charlotte’s banking sector, or tourism on the South Coast, or mountain towns struggling to reinvent themselves.
“My job would be easier if there was only one swing voter, but there isn’t,” Mercer said. “And I think that dynamic is what makes this state so interesting and so hard to win, and why you really need to understand the state as a whole.”