North Carolina is likely to emerge as a major battleground in 2024, with Democrats viewing the state as a potential flip opportunity in the presidential election.
The state has regularly made for a relatively close contest for years, with several presidential, gubernatorial and senatorial candidates winning by no more than a few percentage points. Democrats have found more success historically with the governor’s race, while Republicans have taken federal elections.
But members of both parties said North Carolina will be in play again next year, with Democrats making possibly their most concerted effort in recent years to take the state.
“I do expect a lot more attention here than in the past, not to say we didn’t get attention in the past, but it’s probably going to be much more intense in 2024,” said North Carolina-based Democratic strategist Douglas Wilson.
North Carolina is not new to its status as a swing state. Former President Obama carried the state’s 15 electoral votes on his way to victory in 2008. But Republicans won the state in the following three presidential races — 2012, 2016 and 2020 — though by no more than a few points.
Wilson said he believes the state is “trending purple” because of the population growth in its cities. But he said some obstacles from the past have hurt Democrats’ chances, and challenges in the present could make winning the state more difficult.
He said presidential campaigns, especially if an incumbent is running for reelection as President Biden is this time, often only begin “setting up shop” in the spring or summer of an election year.
“In North Carolina, you need to start talking to voters early, and you need to have folks on the ground early,” Wilson said.
He pointed to Obama’s 2008 campaign in which he developed an effective campaign infrastructure in North Carolina during the primaries to win the state against Hillary Clinton. He then continued his operation there and went on to win the state over Republican John McCain by about 0.3 points.
Wilson said Biden should be developing a presence in the state now.
The Biden campaign said in a memo released earlier this year that it will look to expand Democrats’ electoral map to include North Carolina. A campaign spokesperson told The Washington Post in May the campaign expects the state to be competitive and will invest “early and accordingly.”
Republican strategist Doug Heye, who has worked on several North Carolina campaigns, said Obama was able to catch “everybody by surprise” while state and national Republicans were “asleep at the switch” because they did not expect it to be competitive.
He said growth in areas like Charlotte and Raleigh means Republicans cannot take the state for granted anymore.
Heye said Obama’s victory was seen as a “fluke,” but North Carolina was the second-closest state in 2012 and stayed close in 2016 and 2020 — in the latter, Biden lost to then-President Trump by less than 1.5 points.
“The lesson or the takeaway should be this is going to be a close state and should not be taken for granted,” he said. “In the state, I think people get that. Nationally, they don’t get it at all.”
He warned that the likely GOP nominees for the presidency, Trump, and the governor’s race, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, could pose difficulties for the party’s success in the state in 2024. He said the number of suburban women in and near Raleigh has increased from past years, requiring Republicans to work hard for their votes.
Exit polls have shown that Democrats’ share of suburban women has been largely increasing gradually, and suburban voters in general were key to their victories in 2020 and 2022.
“You don’t want to give those voters a reason to turn away from you,” Heye said.
He said Robinson could cause headaches for the party with several controversial statements he has made in the past.
Robinson has made numerous derogatory comments online criticizing Jews, Muslims, transgender people and Black people who support Democrats. Some of those comments include that Muslims are “invaders,” that Obama is a “worthless anti-American atheist” and that those who “support this mass delusion called transgenderism” are trying to “turn God’s creation backwards and make it into a sickening image of rebellion to glorify Satan.”
Heye noted that Robinson issued a proclamation in support of Israel while serving as acting governor amid the attacks from Hamas, but he was “immediately” asked about his previous antisemitic comments. Robinson sought to walk back some comments and asserted he had never been antisemitic.
“It’s going to cause distractions for the state party, it’s going to define the race negatively, and they’ve got a good competent Democrat who’s running who’s very vanilla, which I mean as a good thing, who just won’t have made those kinds of mistakes,” Heye said, referring to the likely Democratic nominee, state Attorney General Josh Stein.
But Republican strategist Jonathan Felts, who served as an adviser to Sen. Ted Budd’s (R-N.C.) Senate campaign, argued that Republicans have seen wide success in the state despite being “massively” outspent in many races.
He said Gov. Roy Cooper (D) won his first election in 2016 against an unpopular incumbent, Pat McCrory, and significantly outspent his Republican challenger for reelection in 2020 to win by only a few points.
Democrats and Republicans said they expect honing a strong economic message to support working families will be key to success.
“North Carolina will be like a lot of other states in that it’s going to be a referendum on who do you think is the biggest fighter for working families, and I think Donald Trump and Mark Robinson … are much better suited for that argument than are Joe Biden and Josh Stein,” Felts said.
Democrats said their approach needs to be rallying the significant minority population and rural voters to become more engaged in the electoral process.
Cynthia Wallace, the co-founder of a nonprofit called the New Rural Project, said political observers often presume not enough voters are available in rural areas to affect an election.
But she pointed to the 2020 state Supreme Court race in which the Republican defeated the Democrat by about 400 votes out of 5 million cast as proof it can be critical.
She co-founded the nonprofit after unsuccessfully running for the House in 2020 to engage voters of color, especially in rural areas.
“There are a lot of disengaged voters who are not showing up at the polls who could change the outcome of slim 1-to-3-percentage-margin victories,” Wallace said.
Wallace noted that unlike Georgia, a state Democrats were able to flip blue in 2020 through engaging wide swaths of Black voters in Atlanta, North Carolina does not have an “urban center” to make that same kind of engagement.
She said North Carolina is one of the most rural states in the country, so “you cannot change the trajectory of who gets elected without changing the trajectory of rural North Carolina.”
Gabe Esparza, a Democratic candidate for state treasurer, pointed to the state’s growing Latino population as an opportunity for Democrats. He noted that the state has the fastest rate of growth of Latino residents anywhere in the country.
“The reality is in North Carolina that we don’t need hundreds of thousands or millions of Latinos to vote to win. We just need a few extra thousand, let alone a few extra hundred, because of how close the races always are,” he said.
Esparza argued that his background as a Latino and integration with the community will give Democrats an opportunity to make the difference they need with this group.
He said the voting-age population of Latinos in the state will greatly increase soon, adding that the school-age population is higher than the overall Latino population by a 2-1 ratio.
“It’s not as if this is going to be decades and decades and decades, it is coming. But as others have said, political power is not given, it’s taken,” Esparza said. “We need to actually go out and compete on the merits and be able to communicate compelling arguments that allow us to win at the ballot box.”