Harris seeks to build on debate momentum with push to flip North Carolina

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.

“It’s certainly going to help the Harris campaign,” Dinan said, though he added just how much Swift moves the needle is an open question.

In a little more than 12 hours after Swift's endorsement on Instagram, more than 337,000 people visited a custom URL in her post that directed people to a government site that helps with voter registration, according to the General Services Administration, which oversees the website. State-specific data wasn’t available.

Anderson Clayton, the youngest chair of a state Democratic Party, said that Democrats have registered more than 2,500 students at Appalachian State University this year and that 200 students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill registered on Tuesday alone.

“Young people are not monolithic voters,” Clayton, who was elected state chair at age 25, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “We care about the issues that every other person on the ballot is looking at.”

Health care has been a huge issue for the Harris campaign, particularly in North Carolina. In March, Biden and Harris campaigned together here, touting the state's expansion of Medicaid. Harris also vowed to eliminate medical debt for millions of people, and policy experts say a program in North Carolina could offer a road map for the federal government.

Other demographic considerations could make the difference here. One of every 5 North Carolina residents is Black, and there is a growing number of Latino voters. Both are key constituencies for Democrats. The Harris campaign official said it has opened 26 field offices across the state, with six more opening in rural communities in the last month.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is mounting its own effort to court voters. Matt Mercer, a state GOP spokesman, argued Republicans have out-registered Democrats for years because of better policies. He accused Democrats of playing catch-up and questioned how much work was being done in their new field offices.

“Republican leadership in North Carolina is tested and has proven to have a superior ground game,” he said. “It wasn’t abandoned in 2020 like Democrats did.”