Landon Simonini stood in the middle of a Charlotte freeway at 2:30 p.m., stuck in a man-made traffic jam, as motorists waited for Kamala Harris’ plane to land and the motorcade to gather for the rally scheduled for later that day.
He was out of his car, because why not? He wasn’t going anywhere fast. His red Make America Great Again cap stood out among the other caps cursing the traffic gods.
Simonini, a Charlotte native, builds homes. His livelihood depends to some extent on Charlotte’s tremendous growth. But not all growth is great, he said.
“This is a traditionally Southern state,” Simonini said. “More than 100 people move to Charlotte every day. That changes the electoral map. I was born and raised in Charlotte, 33 years. I’ve lived here my whole life. I went to school at UNC Charlotte. This is my city. It’s a conservative city and I want to keep it that way.”
But in the tense 2024 U.S. presidential election, North Carolina is now in play, joining a select list of pivotal swing states whose 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, from where he spent four years wreaking political havoc.
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Until about two months ago, the odds didn’t look like this.
Although North Carolina has had close margins in presidential elections for decades, Obama became the last Democrat to win the state since 1976 in 2008, winning by three-tenths of a percent. Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to turn North Carolina into a contender. In every poll through June, Trump had been beating the president by at least two points, with an average of about six.
Party affiliation can only mean so much in a state with a storied history of split-ticket voting. Nearly four in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million registered voters choose not to align with a political party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new registered voters in North Carolina, while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters.
Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes in 2020, a margin of about 1.3%, his closest winning state, before losing the election. Biden won the four states by smaller margins — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’ rise threw the math into disarray. North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall described the reaction as euphoric.
“It’s such a dramatic contrast to the venom, the poison, the hatred that comes out of Republican events,” she said. “It’s such a stark contrast to the hopes and expectations for the future of Democratic party events.”
Trump’s campaign reportedly recently abandoned its attempts to mount a serious fight in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia, leaving seven states in the political battleground: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and now North Carolina.
We feel like the race, from our point of view, is a toss-up, but we feel like we still have an advantage
Matt Mercer of the North Carolina GOP
When we count the electoral votes, excluding the remaining non-battleground states, Harris starts with 226 and Trump with 219. North Carolina can deliver 16 electoral votes to the winner. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Only Pennsylvania has more electoral votes among the remaining battleground states.
A renewed Democratic voter base is visible in polls, which now show the state tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolina residents who are black; higher African-American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.
But the enthusiasm is much broader, and was on display this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies, one in Charlotte and one a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth this year.
If Harris wins North Carolina and holds on to Michigan and Wisconsin, she would need to win only one of the other four swing states to clinch the presidency. But if Trump wins North Carolina, he could win the presidency with Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, while losing the electoral-vote-rich states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
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Melissa Benton waited on one foot Tuesday night for traffic to clear outside the Greensboro Coliseum. Her right knee rested on a scooter, keeping her broken ankle off the ground. She had come from Charlotte for the event, she said.
Benton is a transplant from the Atlanta area. She left Georgia out of frustration with how her community had changed as growth took hold. The irony is not lost on her.
Locals complain about the rising cost of living, and skyrocketing home prices top the list. Even people who survived the slow-motion collapse of the furniture industry over the past 30 years are saddled with higher property taxes as their homes appreciate.
“Every time I meet a Charlotte resident, I always think, ‘Listen, I’ve been in the same situation as you are now,’” Benton said. “I vow to be a great citizen because I understand what it’s like for new people to come here.” She has a keen eye for municipal issues, services and infrastructure. “But it also keeps Charlotte Charlotteand in some big cities we have lost sight of that.”
Affordable housing is a crisis in Charlotte, as it is in Atlanta and Greensboro and most major cities across the U.S. But in North Carolina, it’s not just an urban problem. Lenoir—pronounced “len-OR”—sits on the edge of the Brushy Mountains of Appalachia, in one of 73 rural counties in the state, and it also has a market-rate housing problem. About a third of North Carolina voters live in rural counties.
The Democratic Party has a field office in Lenoir. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson held a campaign rally there Wednesday for his gubernatorial bid. Secretary of State Marshall held a discussion there last week. No part of the state can escape battleground politics these days.
Democrats have long expected a fierce battle in North Carolina and have invested significant time, money and personnel in the state over the past year.
“The Democratic Party is definitely trying to reach out to young people,” Marshall said. She’s also trying hard to reach out to young women who may have abortion politics on their minds. “They’ve got Sunday school, and they’ve got jobs, and they’ve got kids to feed, and all that. So suburban moms, working women with jobs, you know.”
Harris’ visit to North Carolina for her first meetings since the debate is no coincidence. North Carolina is That important. Trump has a rally planned in Wilmington on the North Carolina coast next week. J.D. Vance, his running mate, will also be in Raleigh next week. The Republican campaign regularly sends surrogates to local events. In two weeks, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson will speak at the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Salt and Light conference.
The Democratic Party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staffers, the campaign said. The placement choices for some offices, such as rural Wilson County in the state’s “Black Belt” and Lenoir in the western mountain region, indicate a shift away from a focus on high-density urban areas friendly to Democrats.
Democrats are also using their considerable financial advantages in fundraising to envelop broadcast and social media in a blanket of Harris advertising. Organizers say they’ve been running ads on the airwaves for a year. Ad tracking firm AdImpact notes that Democrats have set aside about $50 million in ad buys through the end of the cycle, with a particular focus on Black and Hispanic media. Trump didn’t begin advertising in earnest until August.
But Republican campaign officials view many of those efforts as artificial.
“We feel like the race, from our standpoint, is a toss-up, but we feel like we still have an advantage,” said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina GOP. “One of the biggest reasons is our leadership. You know, we didn’t give up a ground game at any level in 2020. What you’re seeing from the Democrats is an attempt to play catch-up.”
The Republican campaign is decentralized, Mercer said, allowing for far-flung efforts in a state that is 560 miles wide, from Manteo in the east to Murphy in the west. “You win statewide by going across the state, and that means west of I-77 and east of I-95.”
“For every person that moves to Charlotte or Raleigh, you have retired couples moving to the coast, or you have military personnel deciding to stay in the state,” Mercer said. “You know, I think Democrats fall into this trap where they think growth is only going to benefit them, and they just miss it.”
The GOP dominates the North Carolina Legislature, which has enough Republicans to override a governor’s veto. But North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is a Democrat, and the state has elected a Democratic governor for the past 30 years, even as it has delivered victories to Republican presidents.
Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has maintained a consistent lead over Robinson throughout the year. Robinson has been an unusually controversial candidate, even by Trump-era standards, with a litany of abusive and anti-Semitic attacks on social media and in public statements.
Robinson has tried to keep a low profile in recent months, even as Stein used his financial advantage to bash Robinson with ads based largely on the lieutenant governor’s own words. In recent weeks, Robinson has gone on the campaign trail, meeting with small groups in small towns far from urban centers, harassing the media and calling Stein’s ads misleading. “Josh Stein is a liar,” he said, demanding that a news reporter deliver that message to his opponent, along with a demand for a debate.
Stein has so far refused.
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James Adamakis watched a Robinson stemwinder from a seat Tuesday at Countryside BBQ in the small town of Marion, North Carolina. It’s a popular stop for politicians in the rural North Carolina mountains. A photo of Barack Obama’s 2011 visit hangs proudly on the wall next to the cash register.
Adamakis works in juvenile justice. The war veteran supports Republicans because they are tougher on crime, he said. But he acknowledges that even people who share his political values can vote in strange ways in North Carolina.
He described the conversion of one of his friends to Republican. “It was the economy, where he just kept seeing inflation and kept buying groceries and everything,” Adamakis said. “He thought, why is the media and Biden saying it’s okay when it’s not? I think the economy cuts across borders.”
“Anyone you meet in western North Carolina may still vote Democratic, but they still don’t like it.”
But political diversity is about more than race in North Carolina. The economy of a place like Research Triangle Park near Durham is fundamentally different from the banking sector in Charlotte, or the tourism industry on the South Coast, or mountain towns struggling to reinvent themselves.
“It would be easier in my job if there was just one person [swing voter]but there isn’t,” Mercer said. And I think that’s the dynamic that makes the state so interesting and so hard to win, and why you really have to understand the whole state.”
