When Barack Obama squeaked by John McCain in North Carolina in 2008, it was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won there in decades. But the Tarheel State has remained just out of reach for Democrats ever since. Obama lost it by just over two points in 2012; Hillary Clinton by three-plus in 2016; and Joe Biden by a mere 1.44 points in 2020, when North Carolina represented Trump’s narrowest margin of victory in the country. (The state’s Democratic senate hopefuls have met a similar fate over the years.)
But there’s reason for Kamala Harris’s campaign to be hopeful about breaking her party’s losing streak. North Carolina’s Democratic infrastructure looks much sturdier than it has in previous years. Polls show almost a pure tossup race. And perhaps most promising, Mark Robinson is on the ballot. The Republican gubernatorial candidate and self-proclaim
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And unlike some other southern states, North Carolina has elected a modern breed of Democrat, not the sort of ‘60s and ‘70s-style Democrats that hung on in redder places. Maybe they’re not progressive, but they’re more on the more liberal side.
They’re very centrist. Roy Cooper’s precincts, where he won and where Trump won — the vast majority of them are in rural counties of North Carolina, but also in what I call the urban suburbs, the classic suburban areas inside an urban county but outside the big city.
North Carolina has a reputation as a state where Democratic presidential hopes go to die. There seems to be renewed optimism this year that 2024 could break the streak, and I’ve seen you make that point. Why do you think that is? Demographics? People just getting tired of Trump? Is it Kamala? Or some combination of all those three?
I think it’s a combination of all of them. I would point to the fact that this is a turnout-driven state. Registered Democrats usually meet the state-turnout rate, but registered Republicans are six points ahead consistently in all the major elections that we’ve had since 2010. I think there’s a generational dynamic, where if voters under the age of 40 show up to their political strength — by my analysis, they are a center-left type of voting bloc, and that could have an impact. Whether Trump has outworn his welcome and where the Nikki Haley primary voters are willing to defect and cross the political aisle to vote for Harris — I think that there’s a combination of things developing in this state that could tip us off the knife’s edge one way or the other.
Some key swing states haven’t changed much demographically in the last ten years, but North Carolina has. Democrats are always so hopeful in part because they think, Hey, a bunch of liberal-leaning college graduates are moving there, but it never quite works out.
They have been waiting for that demographic wave to crest, but they’ve never been willing to put in the resources and the infrastructure, and it looks like Harris has made that kind of investment. Biden started opening up field offices. She has expanded those field offices. The Trump campaign has kind of outsourced their field operations. One interesting shift from four years ago is the percentage of voters residing in the central cities versus the urban suburbs have flipped, and the central cities are about 70/30 Democratic. If you increase the voter turnout, where central cities have lagged in the past several elections, you’re pulling in Democratic votes that you’ve been leaving on the table.
And you think this infrastructure and all those field offices could help with that.
It is the most ambitious ground-game operation I’ve seen since Obama’s ’08 campaign.
I’ve read that Trump’s ground game, which as you said is being outsourced to the likes of Elon Musk, is raising eyebrows from Republicans. It seems like a big risky maneuver, and nobody knows if it will work. What have you heard about it?
It is certainly a novel approach.
To put it diplomatically.
They’re utilizing and coordinating efforts to target low-propensity voters — rural, young white males, for example — and that sector of the electorate could be influential because it only takes a point here, a point there to shift this dynamic one way or the other. But if you’re trying to pull in or tap out the rural dynamic and Democrats are in rich, central cities pulling in much more … I hesitate to guess, because we don’t know how all this is going to play out until Election Night.
The lack of Democratic ground game you’ve observed before this year — do you think that’s just because North Carolina was never the party’s biggest Electoral College priority? Or was it just some sort of state organizational dysfunction?
Well, I don’t think it was necessarily state dysfunction.
Maybe national.
Yeah. There wasn’t the priority and the commitment made, particularly by national organizations, to invest here on the ground. In 2022, for example, you had Cheri Beasley, a Black woman, running at the top of the ticket for the U.S. Senate. You would think that that would motivate Black voters. Black voters actually had a low voter turnout, and Black women had the lowest voter turnout within the race. Election after election after election, the same dynamic plays itself out, and if you’re going to bang your head against a brick wall five or six times, you’ve got to learn that maybe the brick wall needs to be attacked in another way.
