Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are heading to North Carolina this week in a sign both parties believe the map of presidential election battleground states could be widening.
Trump plans to hold a rally Wednesday in Asheville, the main city in western North Carolina, in his second rally in the Tarheel state since President Biden stepped down from the race.
Harris will head to Raleigh on Friday for a rally where she says will unveil her economic proposals.
She had planned to speak in the Democratic bastion last week during a successful blitz of battleground states but scrapped the event after Tropical Storm Debby drenched the state.
North Carolina was the only one of seven closely divided swing states that Trump won over Biden in 2020.
The former president’s campaign had considered the state to be in the bag this year as polls showed him leading Biden by healthy margins across the Sun Belt, including nearby Georgia, which Biden won by a scant 12,000 votes in 2020.
All that changed when Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, who is vying to become the first Black woman president.
Harris, who has visited North Carolina 16 times as vice president, has quickly unified the Democratic base and electrified Black voters, catapulting her into the lead in polls over Trump nationwide.
She’s running neck-and-neck with Trump in surveys of North Carolina, which has voted for GOP presidential candidates three straight times, including twice for Trump.
Democratic strategists believe they have a shot at duplicating their success flipping Georgia in North Carolina, which also has a large Black population and a fast-growing population of college-educated people, who lean Democratic.
The extra focus on North Carolina is bad news for Trump because it suggests both sides see the state as in play. If Harris can win the state, it would open up different paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
“North Carolina is a tough nut to crack for Democrats … (but) the contests are always brutally close and could conceivably go the other way,” said Jacob Rubashkin, an analyst with Inside Elections. “A campaign with cash to spare, such as Harris’, would be wise to try to put it on the map.”
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