EDITOR'S NOTE: Maya King is a politics reporter for The New York Times covering the Southeast, based in Atlanta. She covers campaigns, elections and movements in the American South, as well as national trends relating to Black voters and young people.
Ask any Democrat knocking doors, hosting debate watch parties or making phone calls in the blue pockets of North Carolina over the past several weeks, and they’ll say 2024 feels a lot like 2008.
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That was the year Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in more than three decades. No presidential candidate for the Democrats has managed it since, but an outpouring of excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten their hopes up.
Democrats eager to avoid another disappointment point to the state’s biggest metropolitan area — and the source of the party’s biggest recent heartbreaks — as the key.
Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joe Biden lost the state by less than 2 percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.
Harris visited Charlotte and Greensboro Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.
“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”
The voter coalition that powered Obama’s 2008 victory included an explosion of Black turnout in the urban Democratic strongholds around Charlotte and the Research Triangle that includes Raleigh and Durham, while counting on critical masses of the Democrats spread out in rural regions alongside white college-educated voters and young people. Canvassers in Mecklenburg have focused largely on turning out Black and Latino voters as well as the handful of independent and infrequent voters in the area.
Whether Democrats will be able to pull off a win after so many close calls is still an open question. The state’s electorate remains narrowly divided and Republicans have invested heavily in turning out their most reliable voters in the rural, conservative areas that make up much of the state. But Harris’ galvanizing candidacy, capped by a strong debate performance Tuesday night, has only fed the party’s excitement about their prospects in both the county and North Carolina writ large.
“The Democrats have truly gone from a death march to a campaign that’s energetic and excited and enthusiastic,” said Brad Crone, a veteran Democratic political strategist in the state who is unaffiliated in the race this year. “If they hit the levels that they hit in 2008, the Democrats are going to have a big night.”
That turnout push is shaping up to be extremely expensive, for both sides.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has largely outsourced its ground game in swing states to a network of super political action committees, which have hired paid canvassing firms that in turn seek out a small army of short-term workers to knock on doors.
For example, Blitz Canvassing, a firm hired by one of the super PACs, has posted job listings based in New Bern, North Carolina — a small coastal city — offering $22 to $30 an hour, six days a week, to drum up voter support.
A Democratic group, the Progressive Turnout Project, has also posted listings for “voter contact” jobs in New Bern, offering $125 for “door knockers” who complete a set number of contacts each day.
One person with knowledge of the Trump allies’ efforts in North Carolina described a paid canvassing operation focused largely on rural turnout — an expensive and time-consuming strategy in the pursuit of voters who are more difficult to deliver to the polls.
The focus on rural voters could also mean missing some conservative-leaning voters in blue areas who are open to their message. Ron Robinson, 73, a part-time insurance instructor whose neighborhood west of Charlotte includes a heavy concentration of independent and moderate voters, said he had been inundated with television advertisements and visits from Democratic canvassers. Asked if he’d heard from any Republican groups, he said very few have reached out.
“I’ll talk to anybody,” said Robinson, who said he would vote for Harris and the Democratic candidate for governor, Josh Stein, but plans to support some conservative candidates for state House and City Council. “They just haven’t come out.”
Jason Simmons, chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, defended the party’s strategy, calling it “a much more narrow and focused measure” that is a departure from those used during previous cycles but is far-reaching.
“As opposed to the broader shotgun approach that has been utilized in maybe previous cycles, it’s a much more targeted approach,” he said. “But we have the resources, we have the investments and we have the ground game.”
Republicans have also focused much of their voter mobilization efforts on poll watching training, which Simmons said was effective. Those who attend could serve as poll watchers and greeters, who he argued could monitor activities at precincts and tell other conservative voters about the Republican ticket.
And as Democrats and allied groups argue that a turnout election like this will depend on the strength of grassroots canvassing, a weekend of door-knocking in several key Democratic-leaning areas of Mecklenburg and neighboring counties underlined the challenges that organizers face in getting voters to the polls. Canvassers were often rebuffed by video camera doorbells, do-not-disturb signs and, in some cases, dogs.
More concerning for them, the state Supreme Court’s decision in favor of former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remove his name from North Carolina’s ballot has slowed the timeline of mail-in ballot delivery and complicated the message to voters about alternative ways of voting.
“She said she was going to expand the map and she has succeeded in doing that,” said Marc Farinella, who led Obama’s North Carolina state operation in 2008 and expressed confidence in Harris’ prospects this year. But, he added, “North Carolina is still going to be a tough battle for her. This is no sure thing.”
Harris’ coalition will also rely on the voters who were once skeptical of her campaign.
Sitting on the front porch with her sister in the conservative rural Charlotte exurb of Monroe, North Carolina, Sylvia Winfield Perry, who is a North Carolina native but lives in Los Angeles, recounted her distaste for Harris during her 2020 presidential campaign. Perry said that as California’s attorney general she led a system that prosecuted and imprisoned many Black men.
Now, pointing to what she felt were the dangers Trump and his allies posed, she said, she is comfortable supporting the vice president.
“I believe she has had an opportunity to grow. And I don’t think she’s going to go in there and just allow our children to just die again,” she said. “So I’m going to give her a chance. And if she doesn’t work out right, what do we do? In four years, we vote her out.”
To counter some of this, Democrats have spent millions on the airwaves in all of North Carolina’s media markets. The party is on track to outspend Republicans by nearly $15 million through November, according to an analysis of ad spending from AdImpact, a data-tracking firm.
Still, that has not eased concerns from even the most devoted Democratic voters.
Bob Gelder, 74, an independent Asheville resident, said he planned to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket and makes regular $500 donations to Harris’ campaign. He sees his vote as one against Trump as much as it is in support of the vice president. But he still wasn’t sure if the party he is supporting would be able to win in the state.
“The polls show it even but I doubt that will happen,” he said. “It seemed to me they were even last time. I know he didn’t win by much but we didn’t win in the state. It’s going to be hard to move him out.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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