Former President Donald Trump has won the North Carolina and NBC News projects, capturing the first major battleground of the election so far and strengthening the Republican Party’s hold on the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Polls showed Vice President Kamala Harris had narrowed Trump’s lead in North Carolina when she entered the race in July after President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid.
Democrats had been optimistic that Harris could make gains among educated voters in the state’s Research Triangle area, a robust voting bloc.
But while North Carolina’s NBC News Exit Poll shows Harris holding steady with Biden’s 2020 performance among college-educated voters in the state, Trump made gains among Black voters and young voters and marginal gains among independents.
According to the exit poll, black voters made up 19% of the electorate. And Trump won more than 12% of those, a 5-point increase from 2020, including a 12-point increase among black men.
But North Carolina has always been an elusive prize for Democrats. No Democratic candidate has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008. (Obama lost the state to his Republican rival Mitt Romney four years later.) Before Obama came along, the last Democrat to carry North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
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Trump’s victory in North Carolina underlines the resilience of his MAGA political movement. It is the third time in a row that he has won the battleground, even though he was impeached as president twice and was charged in four separate criminal cases after leaving office in 2021.
That he remains a viable political force underscores both voters’ disillusionment with the status quo in Washington and their belief that Trump is the antidote.
Harris’ most promising path to victory always included the three so-called blue wall states that Trump won in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Still, Democrats were left hopeful that she would pull off a victory in North Carolina. , which might have shown that the party had a path to victory even in states with large rural populations. About a third of North Carolinians live in rural areas.
A number of unexpected developments put the outcome in North Carolina in doubt. Hurricane Helene caused extensive damage in the western part of the state and the city of Asheville. Trump sought to take political advantage of the Biden administration’s response to the storm.
Harris went out of his way to assure North Carolina residents that the opposite was true. During a visit to the state in early October, she attended a briefing by officials involved in the recovery and met with workers at distribution points for food and essential supplies. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, praised the federal government’s handling of the storm and said emergency workers had been on the ground throughout to provide assistance.
Another shock came in September, when CNN reported that North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson had posted inflammatory comments on a porn site a decade ago. Robinson denied making the comments.
Before the article came out, Trump had praised Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” But the accusations proved to be an unwanted distraction for the former president. When he appeared in the state for a meeting following the CNN report, he did not mention Robinson’s name.
Robinson lost his race to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein on Tuesday.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
