Is North Carolina Flipping Blue This November?
North Carolina going for Harris opens up a whole new range of 270 map possibilities.
Most of the people who follow me know that I have been bullish on North Carolina going for Democrats for a couple of years now. Those people also know I was among the very first people publicly predicting Arizona would go for Biden in 2020. These aren’t just hunches. They’re based on demographic changes, transformations of you will. To check my instincts I asked Lucas Holtz, one of my sharpest data guys on The Lincoln Project to check my thinking. He agreed and has written an article to make his case. I’m sharing it here as my first guest writer. I hope you like it. Leave comments if you’d like to hear more analysis from Lucas as we get closer to Election Day.
*Separate note: Western North Carolina communities are reeling after Hurricane Helene struck this last weekend with thousands of families losing their homes and many losing their lives. In times like this, aiding those who have been struck by disaster is one of the few things that we can do to show that there is still humanity in this world. Please donate to one of these organizations working on the ground: BeLoved Asheville (local nonprofit) or the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund.
The news out of North Carolina the last couple of weeks has left Republicans in complete disarray, and Democrats are more optimistic than ever of their chances to flip the Tar Heel state in the presidential election after Joe Biden narrowly lost it by 1.5% (74,000 votes) in 2020.
The GOP nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, has few remaining allies or staff, and has left a trail of chaos in the wake of reports that he called himself a “Black Nazi” on porn forums, cheated on his wife, and wanted to take golden showers. Trump endorsed Robinson and had been praising him long before this story broke. In the most recent Quinnipiac poll, 25% of North Carolinians said Trump’s endorsement of Robinson makes them think less favorably of the former president – but it still remains to be seen just how much of a deadweight Robinson will be on Trump.
It appears that the Harris campaign has begun tying Trump to Robinson in the hopes that moderate Republicans will either not vote in the presidential race or vote for both Democratic gubernatorial nominees Josh Stein and Harris. Whether there will be a significant reverse coattails effect is anyone’s guess, but these elections are won and lost on the margins. Robinson being even a quarter of a percentage point drag on Trump this election would equate to him losing tens of thousands of votes.
Back in June of 2023, I argued that Democrats would be paid dividends if they invested early in North Carolina instead of chasing more expensive battleground states that had been moving away from them in the electoral map. I stand by that and am also more bullish that Dems have a chance to flip the state. Here’s why:
North Carolina Vote Movement
The North Carolina Democratic Party, led by a trailblazer in Anderson Clayton, has made it a top priority to persuade rural and working-class voters in order to stem their exodus from the party. From 2008 to 2020, the western rural and exurban counties of North Carolina’s Appalachia swung 12 points right, and Republicans netted nearly 50,000 more votes than Democrats over this time. On the other side of the state, the rural and small metro counties of the Black Belt, where a significant rural Black population resides, swung 6 points right from 2008 to 2020, and Republicans netted 17,000 more votes than Democrats over this time.
Even marginal improvement with these voters, especially rural Black voters, is crucial to flipping the state. The party leaders understand this – and if Harris wins North Carolina, it will be in no small part due to the leg work that has been done to show up in those rural counties.
Democrats’ saving grace in North Carolina has been capturing and retaining white college-educated voters in the era of the education realignment. As you can see in the map above, the five most college-educated counties in North Carolina (Orange, Wake, Durham, Mecklenburg, and Chatham) have collectively swung 10 points to the left since 2008, and Democrats netted 256,000 more votes than the GOP—a trend that is unlikely to subside. Democratic gains with these college-educated voters have been pivotal to keeping the Tar Heel state the close “toss-up” that it is, but it hasn’t been enough for Democrats to win since 2008.
Where North Carolina Stands in the Polling
In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, Trump leads Harris by just half a percentage point. But to get a better sense of how the Harris coalition is taking shape – and how it has shifted since 2020 – I aggregated a few of the highest quality polls taken in North Carolina and took a look under the hood of the crosstabs.
A picture is emerging in North Carolina that aligns with movement in the national electorate: like 2020, education polarization is continuing to expand as more college-educated voters move towards Democrats, while racial polarization is marginally lessening as more voters of color get peeled off by Trump. Harris is winning 54% of white college voters in North Carolina (improving on Biden by 5 points) and 29% of white non-college voters (trailing Biden by 1 point). Meanwhile, Josh Stein is winning 60% of white college voters (surpassing Roy Cooper by 5 points) and 35% of white non-college voters (on par with Cooper’s 2020 support). At the same time, Harris and Stein are only winning 84% of Black North Carolinians – 10 points worse than Biden and 12 points worse than Governor Cooper in 2020.
When we look at the gender split, it appears that Harris is doing 2 points better with women and 3 points worse with men compared to Biden. Women make up 55% of the North Carolina electorate, so, if this support level were to hold through election day, it would be only a marginal net positive for Harris. Meanwhile, Stein is overperforming Harris by 5 points with women and 3 points with men – hitting the necessary margins for repeating Cooper’s 2020 result.
The last crosstab worth examining, and is so often left out of polling analyses, are self-identified moderate voters. A significant trove of my work at Third Way has involved examining how crucial moderate voters are to Democrats winning the majority in Congress and to taking the White House. Since 1980, Democrats have only won a single presidential election when they did not win over 60% of moderates nationwide. In 2020, moderates broke for Biden 62%-37% over Trump both nationwide and in North Carolina.
To win the White House, Harris must win a similar supermajority of moderate voters nationwide – but if she is to capture North Carolina, the Vice President has to be closer to Governor Roy Cooper’s 67% moderate support level, and, as of today, Harris is at 60% – 7 points off from that goal. In the governor’s race, Josh Stein is at 68% with moderate voters in our average, which is what puts him in a prime position to take the state.
While it remains true that Harris is close to where she needs to be to win the state, she still has substantially more work to do to win moderate voters, limit losses with Black voters, and to stem the exodus of non-college white voters. It appears that future Democratic ad reservations in North Carolina ranks third among the battleground states according to AdImpact (Harris and Democrats’ $33 million versus Trump and Republicans’ $23 million) suggesting that the Harris campaign sees North Carolina as a core priority heading into the last 30 days. However, if 2020 showed us anything, it’s that spending exorbitant amounts of money on ads doesn’t necessarily translate to winning (Democrats spent $220 million on presidential ads in Florida in 2020 and just $19 million in Georgia). A win in North Carolina for Harris would significantly limit Trump’s path to victory, but several indicators show Trump is still barely favored to win with five weeks until election day. Maybe it’s naive optimism, but I do believe that the Harris campaign can close the gap in the remaining days. Time is running short and the Harris folks will have an enormous challenge to reorganize in Buncombe County in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Thanks for a great article, Lucas Holtz. The New Rural Project has been doing a lot of work since 2021 to provide information and GOTV in seven rural counties east of Charlotte [Union, Anson, Richmond, Scotland, Moore, Hoke and Robeson]. I'm hoping their efforts pay off for Harris-Walz.
Also, what is your impression of the effect of Hurricane Helene will have on western NC in the upcoming election?
I loved this article, thank you Lucas! I’m with you and Mike on this. I think Harris had a real shot of winning North Carolina for all the reasons you mentioned. I think the combination of Trump and Mark Robinson madness negatively impacts their voter turnout in the same style James Comey’s email announcement helped to drove down voter turnout for Hillary in 2016. I hope everyone impacted by Hurricane Helene will be okay. It’s an awful tragedy. I hope people all across every impacted area still get a chance to vote.