We talked politics at the North Carolina State Fair and learned three important things: NPR

North Carolina has disrupted battleground state parties in 2024, especially after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the top Democratic presidential candidate.

Political observers had long predicted that six states would decide whether former President Donald Trump would return to the White House: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.

But North Carolina was the state Trump won by the closest margin in 2020, and both parties are pouring resources, time and energy into the Tar Heel state as this year’s presidential election enters its final stages. Polls show the race remains close in North Carolina.

To get a sense of where things stand from the rally itself, the NPR team took on the difficult task of traveling to the state fair. Among the rides and fried food stalls along the way, we learned three important things about racing in North Carolina.

1. Election ads — and Mark Robinson — loom large.

The most remarkable thing about my time in North Carolina was how inundated we were with the election. The commercial breaks on almost every TV channel are filled with campaign ads from start to finish. The same goes for pre-roll ads on the radio and on YouTube and social media feeds.

The election’s fallout spilled over to the fairgrounds, where vendors were selling airbrushed T-shirts depicting Trump’s defiant post-assassination-attempt fist pump with the caption, “You missed it!” The beef jerky stand had a tipped bottle converted into a straw voting device, with a picture of Mr. Harris painted on one cup and a picture of Mr. Trump on the other cup. (This unscientific poll showed Trump with a decisive lead of $12 to $0.)

“We’re ready for the election to be over,” Dejah Boston said as she and her husband, Larmode, and 6-month-old daughter, Kinsley, stopped near the North Carolina Democratic Party’s booth. She saw “too many” ads, “1,000.” The Boston family monitors incoming political content, including text messages, television, and radio.

What on earth was blocking that noise? Boston responded immediately with both Mark Robinson.

The state’s Republican lieutenant governor, who is running for governor, stars in many of the ads covering North Carolina. It’s not necessarily an ad from his own campaign, but a Democratic attack ad seeking to tie Republicans up and down the vote to Robinson’s controversial statements and policy stances, particularly his staunch opposition to abortion rights.

The Trump campaign and other Republicans have distanced themselves from Robinson, especially following a CNN report in which Robinson denied any connection to racist and offensive comments made on pornographic websites. There is. But he still has supporters.

“He’s very vocal and very opinionated,” Faye New said. “But they’re taking parts of what he said out of context. They don’t convey the whole paragraph. They just look at one line and say, ‘Oh, that sounds offensive, so I’m not going to put that in there.’ Just say, ‘Sho.’

2. Everyone has anxiety.

Faye New is an unabashed Republican hardliner. We approached her because we were drawn to her outfit. A bright pink “WOMEN FOR ROBINSON” cap and a T-shirt that says, “I vote for a convicted felon.” (A New York jury found Mr. Trump guilty of falsifying business records in a criminal case earlier this year. Mr. Trump faces felony charges in three additional cases.)

She’s quick to answer everything except the outcome of what’s shaping up to be an incredibly close race in North Carolina. Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have spent millions of dollars in the state and return to the state every week to campaign. Polls show the race is largely deadlocked in the state, which has not voted Democratic at the presidential level since 2008. “It’s a closer fight than I would have liked,” New admitted. “But we’ll never know until all is said and done.”

We then run into Debbie and Lou Love wearing homemade hats cheering on Harris. The hat features a blue comma like a punctuation mark and LA in red cursive. They had voted earlier in the day and do not appear to share many opinions with Mr. New, other than the same anxiety about the outcome. “At 2 a.m. my bowels start complaining and I can’t get it out of my head,” Debbie Love said. “I just pray about it.”

Lou Love takes a more optimistic view: “If[Democrats]can take over North Carolina, we’ll be in good shape.”

it’s true. The state’s 16 electoral votes are likely to play a key role in either Harris or Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes and the White House.

3. The 2024 election is about… a lot of things.

The political importance of North Carolina is clear. What is less clear is what the 2024 presidential election will primarily be about. We asked every voter we met what the stakes and story of the election meant to them, and we received a wide range of answers.

Like many Democrats, Debbie Lu says it’s because of reproductive rights and the ongoing fallout in state legislatures across the country from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe V. Wade. He said there is.

“Please don’t make me cry over abortion. It will tear my heart out of my chest,” Lu said. “Because when a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 16-year-old gets pregnant,” she said, at a loss for words. “I need decision-making authority.”

In response to Dobbs’ decision, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a 12-week abortion ban. This has been a key theme in Democratic campaign ads, with Harris campaigning to sign federal legislation that would restore protections previously granted by Roe V. Wade.

Many Republicans see the race differently — even Dr. Bill Pincus, who was at the North Carolina Right to Life booth at the expo. Pincus spoke passionately that he believes life begins at conception, and that for him opposing abortion rights is about protecting life. But when we asked about the election, he answered about the economy. “I think the reality is that prices have gone up so high that everyone is hurting,” he said.

Inflation has flattened over the past year, but the topic remains raw and politically charged for conservatives. Derek Knipper, who worked at the state Republican Party’s booth, said that for him, the election “is about my wallet. It wasn’t much when Trump was president, but I could live with about $200 in pay.” I remember that,” he said. Now, he said, he is “struggling to get money in his pocket and make it to payday.”

There is another factor. While it’s not something Harris is directly campaigning for, it’s still a top priority for many voters. “Honestly, this is historic for me as a Black woman,” Dejah Boston said.