The picture of the state of the race in the seven critical battlegrounds is coming into focus.
Democrats are finding out the news isn’t good.
And Kamala Harris realized she had a bad problem in this critical battleground.
Issues for Democrats in North Carolina
If Kamala Harris loses one of the blue wall states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – Democrats hoped she could make up for it by picking off a Sun Belt state.
Party strategists viewed North Carolina as the best bet.
Trump carried North Carolina by one point in 2020, and Democrats looked at the influx of college educated white voters as low-hanging fruit to turnout.
Donald Trump kicked off the home stretch of the 2024 election by holding two events in North Carolina.
Republicans viewed those two events, as well as early voting data and poll numbers, as Trump locking down the state.
Experienced political hands, such as Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor Hal Weatherman, said Trump’s visit to North Carolina was his way of putting the state out of reach.
“He’s trying to put the nail in the coffin,” Weatherman told POLITICO. “I’ve run 15 campaigns in North Carolina over a 27-year career. I can tell when a man is trying to drive a nail in the coffin.”
Another North Carolina Republican predicted that Trump wouldn’t have to visit North Carolina again, telling POLITICO “the ground has shifted here in North Carolina.”
Early voting data leaves Republicans feeling bullish
North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Jason Simmons crowed over the GOP turnout in early voting.
“We now have five days of early voting data, and so what we’re seeing is that Republicans are in a stronger position than they’ve ever been historically,” Simmons told POLITICO.
Simmons said the numbers showed that in two of the first five days of early voting, Republicans “have out voted, out performed” their Democrat counterparts.
Simmons told POLITICO that in this point of the early voting data four years ago, “they [Democrats] held a 19-point advantage.”
But in the 2024 election, the Democrat Party early voting advantage is just one point.
“When you’re looking at just the early voting data,” Simmons added, “it continues to show that Republicans are over performing and Democrats are underperforming.”
Democrats are seeing a worrying trend in North Carolina and Georgia.
And that’s the fact that Black voters aren’t turning out at normal rates.
In North Carolina the Black vote is down about 70,000 votes compared to four years ago.
“It’s not a sign Democrats want to see. At least 67,000 fewer Black voters have cast ballots so far compared to this point in 2020, noted North Carolina Democratic consultant Thomas Mills, calling it ‘a huge deficit that Democrats should be scrambling to address,’ and urging them to increase money and time spent on mobilizing Black voters to the polls here,” POLITICO reports.
North Carolina only went Democrat once since 1976.
That was the Barack Obama landslide in 2008.
But if the Democrat vote is down, North Carolina will fall off the map for Democrats.
And this data could help explain why Kamala Harris’ handlers leaked to NBC that they thought North Carolina was a lost cause.
“Of all of the seven [states], that one seems to be a little bit slipping away,” a Kamala Harris campaign official told NBC.
