Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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 slightly 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 toss-up race. And perhaps most promisingly, Mark Robinson is on the ballot. The Republican gubernatorial candidate and self-proclaimed “black Nazi” — whose extremism is a bit much even for the modern-day GOP, and whose campaign appears to be in freefall — just may drag Donald Trump down with him. To gauge Harris’s chances in North Carolina, I turned to Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College who has written (and tweeted) widely about the state’s recently tumultuous politics.
Even before these latest revelations about Mark Robinson, there was an idea that Democrats might benefit from “reverse coattails” — that because Robinson is so extreme, more voters might turn out to oppose him, which would give Dems an advantage in the presidential race to boot. Do you think there’s anything to this theory?
What has been pretty stunning to me is that the Harris–Trump polling numbers are a coin toss. It is within the margin of error, so there is no clear front-runner. But the numbers show such a healthy margin between Josh Stein and Robinson — you’re talking about a quarter of Republicans not voting for Robinson. Could there be enough potential toxicity to affect Trump, to affect down-ballot Republicans as well? I don’t think anybody truly knows until we get the ballots counted.
The state does have a history of electing Democratic governors while not voting for Democratic presidential candidates.
Very much so. Go back 20 years to 2004: George W. Bush wins the state by 12 points, and Democratic incumbent governor Mike Easley wins by 12 percentage points, so you’ve got a 24-point swing. Go back to 2020: It’s a six-point swing in the state between Donald Trump and Roy Cooper. So this fits the model and the history of North Carolina. The question is, how big a swing does it take to push that dynamic to flow through the rest of the ballot?
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 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.
It’s reminiscent of Florida, which Democrats have all but ceded.
Right, because I think Florida is very much calcified. It’s a close state, but it’s so hard and you’ve really got to make the investment. I think in North Carolina, maybe there’s the recognition this year from Biden and now from Harris that “Hey, if we put the effort in, maybe we can flip this.” And then Trump has to run some other wild gamut to get those 16 electoral votes from some other states. And the map just shrinks year after year.
It puts him on the defensive in places he doesn’t want to be.
Right.
There are lots of concerns about Trumpian operatives in Georgia and others meddling with the certification of the results at the county and state level. And the North Carolina Republican Party has quite a reputation for partisanship. I haven’t heard as much about shenanigans going on there on the state level, but is there concern from Democrats that this could get ugly?
North Carolina is unique in that our secretary of State, who is a Democrat, does not have jurisdiction over elections. It is a separate administrative agency that has five members on the board. Because of the governor’s party, it’s three Democrats, two Republicans. All of the counties also reflect that division: three Democrats, two Republicans. So it would be hard to have any county-level shenanigans going on.
If this election is extremely tight, though, there is a provision in the state constitution that might allow the legislature to insert itself. Article six, section five of our state constitution says a contested election for any office “established by Article Three of this constitution shall be determined by joint ballot of both houses.” Whether that includes the presidential race or not is for grabs. If they wanted to do some investigative work into questions of the election returns, I think everybody’s hands would go up into the air as to where that might play itself out.
I don’t even want to think about that possibility.
It’s there.
And this is made possible because Republicans hold a supermajority by one seat in the House, right?
And Senate Republicans have a solid supermajority of 30 seats. So 72 in the state House, 30 in the state Senate.
And that House supermajority came together because one representative, Tricia Cotham, flipped from Democrat to Republican, which ensured that North Carolina passed a 12-week abortion ban. Democrats think that law is much too strict. Do you sense that there’s been a backlash that will lead to a higher turnout the way it has in so many other places around the country?
I think it is certainly an issue motivating Democrats. They rank that fairly high in most of the polls I’ve seen as an important issue that they want to address in this election. It gets washed out because Republicans place it lower and independents are in between the two partisan identifiers, but it’s certainly something that is motivating Democrats with a renewed sense of energy.
But there’s nothing on the ballot about abortion this year, right?
Correct.
Polls have been quite off in North Carolina in the presidential elections, as they have been in some other swing states. They largely predicted a Biden victory in 2020, some by a pretty wide margin. To what extent, as a close observer of this stuff, do you think that problem has been addressed?
When I teach polling, and particularly in my campaigns and elections class this semester, I tell students that the margin of victory in North Carolina is going to be within the margin of error. It is just simply that close. And so I think with all the issues that polling has nowadays, just accept that we’re a toss-up state.
In a way, there’s no point to these polls. It’s going to be a one- or two-point race — you can take that to the bank.
Yeah. We’ve just got to accept fate and, as I say, let the voters have their voice. That’s the best poll you can take.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described North Carolina state representative Tricia Cotham’s party switch.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.