Opinion | There Are Battleground States — and Then There’s North Carolina

Around 8 p.m. on Friday — when there was no discernible wind, no rain, no lightning, nothing like that — all the lights in my house in Chapel Hill, N.C., died, and I looked outside to see my entire neighborhood in darkness.

I immediately suspected the election.

That’s not because I’m paranoid. (Well, maybe a bit.) It’s because of all the twists, turns and tension in North Carolina over the months leading up to Nov. 5. Perhaps more than any other battleground state, North Carolina has been a lode of MAGA extremism, a hothouse for conspiracy theories and a font of lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of ballots and auguring more and worse protests on or after Election Day. Some prank or vandalism involving the power grid hardly seemed out of the question.

Early Saturday the electricity returned; an email from the power company cited “equipment failure.” I wasn’t calmed. How could I be among the nonstop television commercials, the countless yard signs, the door knocking, the cold calling and the incessant, traffic-snarling visits from the candidates themselves? Here in North Carolina, with its juicy trove of 16 Electoral College votes, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump haven’t so much sweet-talked as stalked us. She dropped in on Saturday, as did he — twice. He came back on Sunday. And again on Monday, on the off chance we’d forgotten him.

North Carolina is all the 2024 dynamics distilled, every national plotline in Day-Glo miniature. It’s mood ring and mirror, and it will answer the biggest, most consequential questions about what’s happening in the electorate. My confident prediction: If Harris wins here, she wins the whole shebang, because it means that she benefited from efforts and currents with huge relevance to the other six major battleground states. As I map it, her path to 270 or more Electoral College votes runs through this patch of purple.

No wonder everyone here is on edge.

“I’ve never seen people as anxious,” former Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who spent more than a quarter century in the House, told me. He said that while North Carolinians are used to swing-state intensity, “this time has been different. This is no-holds-barred.”

By at least one measure, North Carolina represents Harris’s best opportunity to pick up a state that President Biden lost in 2020, because his defeat here — by only about 1.3 percentage points — was his most narrow, and the state’s brisk population growth since then has been concentrated in metropolitan areas that favor Democrats and has included many college-educated voters and people of color, two groups that skew Democratic.

But North Carolina still has more rural voters than any of the other six major battleground states, and Harris’s fortunes could hinge on whether she chips away at Republicans’ enormous advantage in what is undeniably Trump Country. Among Democratic activists, there has been increased focus this year on voters in North Carolina’s deep red counties. Harris is about to discover if it paid off.

She is also about to discover just how mighty her turnout operation is. Several seasoned political experts told me that her campaign’s footprint in the state is more impressive than any previous Democratic presidential candidate’s; in a recent column in The Washington Post, Dana Milbank counted 360 paid staff members, 29 field offices, 40,000 volunteers and, in one week, more than 100,000 door knocks and more than 1.8 million phone calls.

But Harris’s energized foot soldiers could be marching uphill. Only one Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina in this millennium — Barack Obama, in 2008, by less than half a percentage point. For the past eight years, both of the state’s U.S. senators have been Republican. And while the most recent, final election poll by The New York Times and Siena College put Harris two points ahead of Trump in North Carolina, it deviated from other surveys over recent weeks, which gave Trump a slight edge of a similar margin.

All is in flux. At the start of North Carolina’s early voting period, which lasted from Thursday, Oct. 17, through Saturday, Nov. 2, number crunchers saw trouble for Democrats. At the end they saw light, including robust turnout by women — who, national polling shows, favor Harris by a big margin. (In sum, a record 4.2 million North Carolinians participated in early voting, and by the end of the weekend, about 57 percent of the state’s eligible voters had cast their ballots.)

Two weeks ago, I detected a subtle discouragement among North Carolina Democrats that was consistent with an NBC News article and headline about “signs of North Carolina slipping.” Two days ago, I detected the opposite.

Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat in the North Carolina Senate who is running for another term, told me on Sunday that during conversations she’d just had with voters at a polling station in a predominantly red patch of her purple district, “almost everyone I talked to was a Democrat.”

“The plural of anecdote is not data,” she conceded, but she said that her interactions over the past few days had convinced her that “reproductive rights are driving turnout” and that some North Carolina women who don’t reliably vote Democratic would do so this time around.

If the defense of abortion rights in a post-Roe America indeed has a major impact on the 2024 vote, that might be especially evident in North Carolina, given its high-profile governor’s race, in which the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, has faced a withering ad campaign spotlighting his past support for an abortion ban with no exceptions and past statements like his insistence that abortion is “about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice — because you felt like getting your groove thing on.”

Robinson’s history of extremist positions and viciously bigoted comments made him the apotheosis of MAGA fury and a test case for a swing state’s tolerance for that even before a CNN report in mid-September that he had once frequented a porn site where he identified himself as a “black NAZI!” and celebrated slavery. Although he denied that and later filed a lawsuit against CNN, many of the people working on his campaign quit and many Republicans outside North Carolina effectively gave up on him. That final Times/Siena poll put the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, the Democratic nominee for governor, 18 points ahead of Robinson.

Could that hobble Trump, who early this year called Robinson “better than Martin Luther King” but, over the past month and a half, pretended that Robinson never existed? It’s a question occupying the thoughts of many political analysts, because even if a sizable group of North Carolina Republicans or Republican-leaning independents are comfortable with a Trump-Stein ticket split, what percentage of them have been so demoralized and disgusted by the Robinson melodrama that they just don’t bother to vote? And while Harris’s turnout and advertising efforts have a well-funded, well-organized echo in Stein’s, Trump gets no such backup or boost from Robinson’s neutered, shambolic bid. That variable makes North Carolina particularly fascinating.

As does the cataclysmic damage wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Although early voting numbers from that largely red part of the state contradict many Republicans’ panic that their supporters wouldn’t be able to cast ballots, the storm could nonetheless have a political effect. In its aftermath, Trump and many other prominent Republicans made all sorts of charges and promoted all manner of conspiracy theories about government officials targeting or ignoring Helene’s victims. That spasm of MAGA madness could activate the MAGA troops — or, just as easily, remind vacillating voters of how divisive, deceitful and exhausting Trump is.

The craziness isn’t kaput. A week and a half ago, Representative Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican who is chair of the House Freedom Caucus, was caught on video seemingly suggesting to fellow conservatives that, in light of Helene, the North Carolina legislature simply award the state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. Harris insisted that the remark was taken out of context, but it dovetailed with a bevy of election-related lawsuits that Republicans have already filed in North Carolina.

“My concern is that those are a pretext to challenge any results that they don’t like,” Damon Circosta, who served as the chair of the North Carolina State Board of Elections from 2019 to 2023, told me. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in North Carolina, agreed: “I’m fully anticipating that if Harris wins this state, we will experience what Georgia and Arizona did in 2020.”

But what’s foremost in Bitzer’s mind is not a near certainty but a nagging mystery — the solution to which could determine Harris’s and Trump’s fates. “Tell me what the 250,000 Nikki Haley Republicans from March do,” he told me. Roughly that many people chose Haley over Trump in North Carolina’s Republican primary, although it was obvious by then that Haley’s quest for the party’s presidential nomination was futile. It was a clear vote against Trump, so it’s hard to imagine those people casting ballots for him now. But do they simply not vote for president? Not vote, period? “There are undercurrents we’re just not picking up at all,” Bitzer told me.

Morgan Jackson, a prominent Democratic strategist in North Carolina who has been the chief political adviser for Stein and for Gov. Roy Cooper, a term-limited Democrat in his final months in office, predicted that those Haley supporters, many of whom he described as “white, college-educated Chamber of Commerce” types, cross party lines because Trump is that toxic.

Jackson said that he had heard from “college-educated guys who I grew up with or went to college with, who’ve been Republicans their whole life — they loved Ronald Reagan, loved George Bush, loved Dick Cheney — and who told me: ‘I’m voting for a Democrat for the first time. I don’t like Kamala Harris. But Trump cannot be president again.’ These are folks who want to move on from Trump and take their party back.”

The outcome in North Carolina will show not only how many of those disgruntled Republicans exist but also whether this state has finally and fully turned in a “New South” direction that has been ballyhooed since I went to college here in the 1980s but wasn’t the case then — Senator Jesse Helms still ruled the Republican roost — and has never fully materialized.

“Ever since forever, we’ve thought that one of these days, things are going to tip around here,” Price, the former congressman, told me. “But we’re always falling short.”

And now? In a voice that held more yearning than swagger, he said: “This may be that tipping point.”

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Source photograph by Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

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