GREENSBORO, N.C. — Riding a fresh wave of momentum after her debate performance, Vice President Kamala Harris is ramping up her campaign Thursday by holding two rallies in North Carolina as she tries to wrestle back the key battleground state and close off one of former President Donald Trump’s main paths to victory.
Both campaigns see the state as playing a key role in November. Trump narrowly won it in 2020, and no Democrat has prevailed in the presidential race here since Barack Obama in 2008. There’s also a hard-fought battle for governor, in which Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein faces Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
“Voters across North Carolina are building a powerful coalition to elect Vice President Harris and to defeat Donald Trump and his allies like Mark Robinson, who are pushing an extreme Project 2025 agenda to rip away our freedoms, raise costs on our families and undo the Medicaid expansion we fought so hard to deliver,” said Dory MacMillan, the Harris campaign’s North Carolina communications director. “This is going to be a close race — but we have built a campaign ready to win close races and to reach voters across the political spectrum in our cities and in rural areas.”
According to a Quinnipiac University poll out this week, Harris leads Trump 49% to 46% in North Carolina, within the survey’s margin of error. It’s still an extremely tight race, but it’s an improvement for Democrats from where President Joe Biden stood in the spring. A Quinnipiac University poll in April found Trump leading Biden 48% to 46%, again within the margin of error.
A Harris campaign official said her team is entering a new, more aggressive phase with staffers spending all day Wednesday reviewing video from this week’s debate to select moments to drop into new TV and digital ads.
For months, the Biden team insisted that North Carolina was within reach, but Biden struggled to overtake Trump partly because of his failure to motivate younger voters. Now, the Harris campaign says it’s seeing an unprecedented rush of volunteers in the state, especially young adults.
Since Harris became the presumptive nominee, another campaign official said, more than 20,000 new volunteers have signed up. The official said nearly 2,000 North Carolinians signed up to volunteer during Tuesday night’s debate, almost a quarter of them students at campus watch parties.
“Younger voters traditionally are not engaged in politics to the same level as older voters,” said John Dinan, a political science professor at Wake Forest University. “The challenge is: How do you engage them?”
It’s not clear how much of a boost Taylor Swift’s endorsement this week will provide.