‘Very competitive’: Inside the Kamala Harris campaign’s plan to flip NC, defy history

Kamala Harris’ new presidential campaign views North Carolina not just as a potential bonus prize on the electoral map this fall, but the possible linchpin in her path to victory against her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.

Democrats started spending money early on in a state they insisted they could win in the presidential contest. Now senior campaign advisers tell McClatchy that Harris’ replacement of President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee has not only scrambled the race, but the map as well, raising the odds that Americans will be waiting Election Night on the results from North Carolina and Arizona — not just Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to learn who has won the White House.

A senior campaign official said that North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s decision on Monday night, publicly withdrawing himself from consideration to join the ticket as Harris’ vice president, had no impact on the calculus driving their strategy in the state.

That strategy, officials said, has been fueled instead by internal data focused on the kinds of new voters moving into the state, modeling the electorate and their propensity to vote, and examining special election and off-year election results — data that holds regardless of Cooper’s choice and that campaign officials believe is far more predictive than head-to-head polling conducted months in advance.

And all of that data is telling Harris’ advisers that North Carolina’s fast-changing electorate will make for a “very competitive” race in November, the official added.

“I don’t really view it as a Blue Wall path, or a Southern path, or a Western path. I don’t think that’s how people should think about this. There are seven or-so states, all of which have been extremely close cycle after cycle,” Dan Kanninen, battleground state director for the Harris campaign, said in an interview.

“They’ve been effectively toss-ups,” Kanninen added. “So I think all seven of those are gonna be close. The difference is, we have built an infrastructure designed to win a close race. The Trump campaign has not.”

DATA DRIVING CONFIDENCE

The Biden campaign — now transformed into the Harris campaign — has made frequent stops in North Carolina. Harris will make her eighth visit of the year and her first as a presidential candidate to the state next week, and will bring her yet-to-be-announced running mate to Raleigh with her.

On paper, Harris faces an uphill battle in a state that has gone for a Democratic candidate for president only twice in the last 50 years: for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Barack Obama in 2008.

Since the last presidential election, North Carolina Republicans have grown their registration numbers by 156,000, while Democrats have shed 126,000 registrants, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections – numbers that on their face appear to challenge Harris in her quest to exceed Biden’s 2020 performance, when he lost the state to Trump by 1.3% of the vote, or 74,000 votes, his narrowest loss that year.

That is just the continuation of a long trend that began in 2016, when Democrats held a voter advantage of nearly 645,000 over Republicans, said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina Republican Party.

“If you want to talk about the impact that Donald Trump has had in North Carolina,” Mercer said, “it’s Democrats shedding half a million voters to either Republicans or unaffiliated voters. That is a stark repudiation of a party that essentially controlled North Carolina for a century.”

But the Harris campaign told McClatchy and N&O their data indicates voter trends across the state are working in their favor, with 57% of newly registered voters in North Carolina since 2020 being millennial age or younger, 34% identifying as Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Pacific Islander, and 38.7% being registered as unaffiliated with either party — three cohorts that are increasingly breaking for Harris in their polling.

Campaign leadership is drilling down at the county level on which districts saw Nikki Haley — Trump’s strongest and most moderate challenger in the Republican primary — overperform her statewide total, with 25% or more of the GOP vote, including in New Hanover, typically seen as a state bellwether, and Union, an historically conservative area.

Even still, Kanninen said registration numbers don’t necessarily predict “the electorate that will show up in the fall,” noting the campaign is planning an aggressive push to maximize the state’s one-stop voting system, where residents can turn up at a polling site both to register and vote at the same time.

“What I will tell you is that the on-the-ground enthusiasm that we see in North Carolina has been incredibly strong — maybe historic — in the past week, and we’ve had a campaign that’s been built to capitalize that, in a way the Trump campaign has simply been absent,” Kanninen said. He pointed to a gathering to train volunteers in Greenville days after Harris entered the race that drew nearly 100 people — a relatively sizable crowd in a small city that surprised the campaign.

While both Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, and Biden both ultimately invested in North Carolina, neither did so until much later in the election cycle, Kanninen noted, placing those campaigns further behind in building the infrastructure he said would be needed to win. The Biden-Harris campaign has been investing in the state since February.

Building out early has allowed the campaign to reach out to a key voting bloc — rural Black voters — earlier than they would have otherwise, and also begin their effort to “cut the margins” of Trump’s support among moderate Republicans and “middle partisans” in rural counties, Kanninen said.

“We put into place infrastructure early — leadership teams on the ground in February and March, building robust teams throughout the spring, now to the point of having 150 staff in North Carolina that will get much, much bigger before the end of the summer,” Kanninen said. “We’re at scale, and building to a greater scale, so that when people start paying much closer attention after the convention and beyond, we’ll have the people, the resources, the volunteers to capitalize on that and drive it, which really matters in a close race.”

ROBINSON ‘MADE POSSIBLE’ BY TRUMP

Confident that the data supports a potential victory, Harris’ campaign has settled on a clear strategy in the state: tying Trump to the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

North Carolinians have a long history of “ticket-splitting,” choosing candidates of different parties down ballot. But Kanninen argued that Robinson was a creature of Trump’s making, indelibly tied to the former president.

“I don’t think it’s a one-off that Mark Robinson exists in a vacuum from Donald Trump. I think he is made possible by Donald Trump,” Kanninen said.

“Donald Trump endorsed him, and vice versa. He spoke at the convention,” Kanninen added. “And I think there’s no escaping the fact that the sort of politics you see from Robinson looks, feels and sounds just like Donald Trump. And I think that will be on the ballot.”

The Harris campaign believes that Robinson’s record — calling LGBTQ+ Americans “filth,” stating he would not compromise on abortion restrictions and quoting Hitler on social media — will prove toxic to moderate Republicans, Republican women and independents, recreating the coalition that challenged Trump and supported Haley in the GOP primary.

“Those voters are really turned off by that sort of toxic MAGA rhetoric, and Mark Robinson is a direct throughline to Donald Trump. They see that as a sort of MAGA ticket, so to speak,” Kanninen said. “I think that is a winning playbook for people who are new to the state, but do not ascribe to those kinds of politics.”

Mercer said the state Republican Party is prepared for the attacks. “It’s a campaign, right? Both sides do their best to work to define their opponent,” he said.

But the Trump campaign does appear to be taking threats to its hold on North Carolina seriously, taking out a television ad buy in the state starting Thursday.

“I think you’re always looking at solidifying your position,” Mercer said of the ad buy, “and, despite having a strong position, you don’t want to get complacent, either. So it’s treating it with the appropriate levels of concern.”

Neither side is expressing exuberant confidence. Kanninen, for his part, acknowledged the race for the state would come down to the wire.

“There’s some political gravity that I think is true in a place like North Carolina, or in some of the other core battlegrounds,” he added. “They’ve been really close races, they’re destined to be really close races.”

McClatchyDC reporter David Catanese contributed reporting.