By Stephanie Kelly
ROCKY MOUNT, North Carolina (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe BidenThe uphill battle to win North Carolina, a state Democrats see as crucial to this election and have invested heavily in for months, has only intensified after his shaky performance in Thursday’s presidential debate.
Biden will appear in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday for what was supposed to be a triumphant campaign rally, a day after his showdown with Republican challenger Donald Trump.
But now Democrats are doing everything they can to contain the fallout from his weak performance, with polls showing the Tar Heel state favoring Trump even before the two men’s debate.
Biden has already visited the state three times this year, Vice President Harris has been there five times and Democrats have spent millions on advertising, hiring campaign staff and a county-by-county tour to energize Black and rural voters, confident that the changing demographics of the state could make this happen. mean it turns around.
So far it’s not working.
In the 2020 election, Trump defeated Biden in North Carolina by fewer than 75,000 votes, or 1.3 percentage points, even though he lost nationally.
According to an average of national and state polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, he is currently the favorite to beat Biden in the state by 6.1 percentage points.
That average hasn’t shrunk substantially as Democrats spend time and money in the state: Three months ago, Trump led Biden by 6.3 percentage points.
It is unclear how Biden’s trip Friday to North Carolina, where only one Democrat has been elected in a presidential election since 1976, will affect the polls.
“This was the state that Biden went to right after the debate — he’s making it clear that this is the state we need to have,” said Michael Munger, a political science professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “And maybe he should have picked one that was a little easier.”
Biden’s campaign has spent more than $4 million on digital ads in the state since early March, according to AdHawk, a digital ad tracking platform run by liberal super PAC Priorities USA. Most ads focus on topics such as health care, the economy and abortion.
The Trump campaign spent no money on digital persuasive advertising in the state during the same period, AdHawk data shows. Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed conservative political advocacy group, spent about $11,500.
In a statement to Reuters, the Biden campaign pointed to Democrats’ victories in several recent municipal elections in North Carolina’s swing counties as a sign that Biden’s agenda will resonate with voters.
Trump’s campaign has not responded to requests for comment on its strategy in North Carolina, although the Republican National Committee has previously described Democrats’ efforts in the state as “setting money on fire.”
A planned Trump rally in April was canceled due to weather, but Trump appeared at a NASCAR race in the state in May.
Still, Democrats are redoubling their efforts. They have 18 field offices across the state and about 80 campaign staff on the ground, a number that will triple by August, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper told MSNBC on Wednesday.
In 2020, the campaign currently had no field offices in the state.
“I think sometimes people think North Carolina is the ‘great white whale,’ (winning) can’t happen here,” Democratic Party Chairman Anderson Clayton told Reuters in May. “And I think, ‘Honey, you’ve got to let us win one more time.'”
North Carolina has no less than 16 votes in the Electoral College of 538 electors that chooses American presidents. That is one more than in the 2020 elections. That makes it a particularly attractive prize.
A win would help Biden achieve the overall victory even if he loses Arizona, Georgia or Wisconsin, states he won in 2020, which is not a guarantee this year.
“If Donald Trump loses North Carolina, he loses the presidency,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison told a room of supporters in Smithfield, a town of about 12,000.
FOCUS ON BLACK VOTERS
Last month, Harrison and Clayton — 26 and the youngest political party chairman in the U.S. — traveled to the eastern part of the state for two days to speak to black and rural residents.
According to the 2020 Census, North Carolina has one of the largest Black populations in the country at about 20%, with eight counties with majority Black residents.
In the 2020 election, those voters declined. The number of Black registered voters in North Carolina fell 1.2% from 2016 to 1.52 million, according to a report from Democracy NC, a nonpartisan voting rights organization.
Biden can win the state by gaining just 42 more votes per district in each county compared to the 2020 election, Clayton calculated.
Harrison took aim at Biden’s funding of hundreds of projects in the state through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare recipients in the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We know that in the black community, especially in the South, because we eat too much barbecue and banana pudding, we know that you either have diabetes, you’re prediabetic, or you know someone in your family or circle of friends who has diabetes,” she said. Harrison to a group gathered at Word Tabernacle Church in Rocky Mount, one of the largest churches in the state.
(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly; Editing by Alistair Bell)
