Trump and Harris’ frantic final campaign stops in 2024 show why North Carolina matters

• Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will largely close out the 2024 race in Pennsylvania.

• But it is Trump’s campaign making a belated attempt to widen its path to victory.

• Both sides also play for North Carolina.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are saying a lot about their shutdown strategies by using the most valuable resource left Campaign 2024: their time.

The top two contenders have visited or will visit each of the seven swing states last days of the campaign. Harris spent Friday in Wisconsin, Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina, and today he will criss-cross Michigan. Trump spent Friday in Michigan and Wisconsin, Saturday in North Carolina, and today will be in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. Both hopefuls spent Thursday in Nevada and Arizona.

Trump chooses the most striking approach. He spent part of Friday in New Mexico and Saturday in Virginia, neither of which has voted for a Republican for president in 20 years. His campaign even added a last-minute rally in New Hampshire with vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance. No major election forecaster considers any of these three states a “toss-up.”

Saturday showed there could still be a surprise in this chaotic race, even if polls and experts say otherwise.

Harris might be able to expand her deck without really trying. The widely respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Survey showed her a 3 percentage point lead among likely Iowa voters. Iowa, once a swing state, has swung heavily toward Republicans in recent elections, and no one thought Trump would risk losing a state he won easily in 2016 and 2020. Another poll showed Trump leading the state, but the biggest takeaway is Trump’s struggles with older women. If that’s true elsewhere in the Midwest, he’s in serious trouble.

The state that stands out most on the schedule.

Not surprisingly, Trump and Harris are focusing most of their efforts on Pennsylvania, the key swing state.

Harris would win the race by retaining the “Blue Wall”, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and the so-called Blue Dot, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. In that scenario, Trump could win the remaining four swing states and still fall short.

On the other hand, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Harris would be in trouble. If Harris were to win Michigan and Wisconsin, she would still have to add Georgia or North Carolina to her column. Even winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona wouldn’t be enough to get her into the White House.

That’s why Trump’s decision to spend a lot of time in North Carolina is a big one. He will spend the second-most time in the state after Pennsylvania in the final days of the campaign. Harris held a rally in Charlotte on Saturday before flying to New York to make a surprise appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live.’

Major polls show Trump with just over a one percentage point lead in the Tar Heel State. Despite President Obama being the only Democratic presidential candidate hopeful of capturing the state since 2000, Trump only narrowly stopped President Biden from doing so four years ago.

Some of Harris’ aides mocked Trump’s decision.

“Donald Trump is concerned about losing North Carolina,” Harris spokesperson Ammar Moussa wrote on X under two siren emojis.

Doug Sosnik, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton and a North Carolina native, doesn’t see Harris’ path there.

“It’s a state that guys like me would have told you 10 years ago would now be a Democratic state, like Virginia, but it’s not,” Sosnik said.

North Carolina is “not a level playing field” for Democrats, Sosnik said, pointing to Democrats’ struggles there, with the exception of Obama.

“It’s competitive. It’s something worth fighting for. If she has the resources, she should stick with it and maybe she can win it,” Sosnik said.

The Trump campaign echoed that it was Harris who was actually concerned.

“President Trump is leading in every battleground state and he has been on the offensive in historically Democratic states like New Mexico and Virginia,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Business Insider. “Meanwhile, Kamala Harris remains on the defensive, deploying more resources to get out the vote in black communities and send Bill Clinton to New Hampshire.”

Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College, said one of the wild cards for North Carolina this cycle is the large number of people who moved to the state after 2020.

Only two other states, Florida and Texas, will add more people in 2023, according to the Census Bureau. Since 2020, an average of about 99,000 people have moved to North Carolina from other states each year, according to the Office of State Management and Budget.

Trump is also dealing with the fact that some of his strongest counties were devastated by Hurricane Helene, prompting officials to rush to move polling places.

“If North Carolina is close, if it looks like Harris is a hair ahead, I think a lot of the votes in Western North Carolina are going to be scrutinized within an inch of their lives,” Roberts said, adding that she is not convinced that every vote in the affected areas will be there by the deadline.

Read the original article Business insider