The road to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. runs through North Carolina, by the math and evidenced by the campaign schedule of its hopeful residents Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Likely to have surpassed 7.8 million registered voters by the time early in-person voting ends on Saturday, the state has turned out in record numbers led by invigorated Republicans. Tuesday, the longest statewide ballot of every four years climaxes with polls opening at 6:30 a.m. and closing at 7:30 p.m.
Mud has been slung, opponents’ platforms nitpicked, and election lawyers continue to reap a bountiful harvest that promises to stretch past Election Day.
“It’s really extraordinary in some ways that we’re even having this conversation, almost four years since Jan. 6 and given everything that’s transpired,” said Asher Hildebrand, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “Even though Congress has tightened the electoral count, and has kind of closed some of the pathways through which a president could challenge the results, there’s still plenty of ground in the system we have for a losing candidate to cause trouble, and if enough trouble is caused at the margins, that could be decisive.”
The race between the Republican former president, twice a winner of the state, and the Democratic vice president in the Biden administration has dominated conversation from Murphy to Manteo. On Saturday, Harris is in both Atlanta and Charlotte on her campaign trail; Trump treks through Salem, Va., Greensboro and Gastonia.
Pennsylvania has 19 electoral college votes, North Carolina and Georgia 16 each, Michigan 15, Arizona 11, Wisconsin 10 and Nevada six. All have been and will be campaign destinations over the final 10 days.
That’s 93 electoral votes and most forecasters think Trump needs at least 51 of those to win, while Harris can skate by with just 44, said Dr. Jason Husser, director of the Elon University Poll with expertise on public opinion, campaigns and elections, polling, and both North Carolina and Southern politics.
“North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes would go a long way for either campaign, and our results are consistent with most other surveys showing North Carolina remains far too close to call,” he said. “With very strong early voting turnout for both parties, North Carolina is a state likely to be decided by how the 4% of undecided voters break between the two candidates.”
North Carolinians will elect 14 members to the U.S. House of Representatives for two-year terms. The split is 7-7 and forecast to go 10-4 or 11-3 for Republicans, pending a race between Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout and Democratic Rep. Don Davis in the 1st Congressional District. The U.S. Senate seats are not on the ballot again until 2026 (Sen. Thom Tillis) and 2028 (Sen. Ted Budd).
The nation’s only statewide race between sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives is the matchup for attorney general between Reps. Dan Bishop and Jeff Jackson. It’s one of the 10 Council of State offices (four-year terms) that includes the governor; lieutenant governor; commissioners of agriculture and insurance; the secretaries of state and labor; auditor; treasurer; and superintendent of public instruction.
From leading some polls to the torpedo of a Sept. 19 report from CNN, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein each chase historical firsts. The governor’s race has not been won by a Black or a person of Jewish faith, respectively.
“You might want to boldly predict a Stein victory over Mark Robinson, and perhaps a big one,” said Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “The caution is that the polling for Roy Cooper in 2020 in his reelection bid, he was winning by double digits in most of the polls and only ended up winning by 5%. So the Stein campaign is definitely on guard for not believing the polling.
“There’s been no ads for Mark Robinson in the last three weeks, even though he is the star of almost every Democratic ad. Whether there’s reverse coattails that hurts Trump, probably not significantly, but even a couple thousand votes can matter in North Carolina, where the real damage might be done is in the downballot races.”
In 2020, Trump won North Carolina 49.9%-48.6% over the ticket of Joe Biden and Harris. In 2016, Trump won the state 49.8%-46.2% over the ticket of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. Trump outperformed the September and October polls each time. Unlike those two campaigns, this year he has a modest lead.
Trump’s winning differences were 74,483 of more than 5.5 million votes cast in 2020, and 173,315 of more than 4.7 million cast in 2016. Turnout in 2020 was more than 75%, in 2016 just under 69%.
“Polls are not a tool that are sufficient for doing the work that we want them to do in a close election. They just aren’t,” said Sunshine Hillygus, a professor of political science and director of the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology. ”Even if the methods were perfect, you are still going to run into the fact that we don’t know who’s going to turn out, and so the scientific value of a poll is, if you take a random sample from the population, you can generalize from that sample to the population with a margin of error. However, we don’t know the population because we don’t know who’s going to turn out, and so pollsters have to make assumptions.”
She pointed to documentation that shows Trump voters “are particularly hard to reach or less likely to respond,” leaving pollsters to deal with it in their own ways.
In Elon’s poll released earlier this week, the concerns for the presidential campaign remain consistent with various polls throughout the calendar year. The economy was cited by 71%, immigration 41% and health care 34%.
Husser acknowledged that while many residents are anxious about the election, what worries them depends on their political affiliation.
“Republicans are more concerned about fair and accurate vote counts while Democrats are more concerned about the other party’s nominee not accepting the results of the election,” he said. “Voters of both parties are united, however, in that over 60% of both Democrats and Republicans see it as at least somewhat likely people working on behalf of either of the major presidential campaigns will try to fraudulently change the outcome of this year’s election.”
