Will North Carolina be the big surprise on Election Day?

With its sixteen electoral votes, North Carolina is strategically important for both presidential campaigns. If Donald Trump wins there as well as he did in Georgia and Pennsylvania, he will get the 270 electoral votes he needs. If he doesn’t, he’ll need two other states outside his base in the Electoral College. Kamala Harris could win the presidency by taking on all the Blue Wall states. But if she loses one, North Carolina offers her the most likely route to victory as Georgia and Arizona increasingly lean toward Trump in the final days of the election.¹

Of the seven swing states this year, North Carolina is the most puzzling. It is the only swing state that Donald Trump carried in 2020, losing the national popular vote by 4.4 points. He received 49.9% of the state’s vote, compared to 46.9% nationally, while in North Carolina Biden underperformed his national share by 2.7 points, polling just 48.6%. In short, Trump was nearly six points ahead of his national showing in the Tar Heel State.

Because Trump is much more competitive in the national popular vote and in swing states this year, he would be expected to be well ahead in North Carolina. But he isn’t. All polls show that with a lead of at most one point, he is not much better than his national performance.

We have good reason to believe that the internal polls of both campaigns are consistent with the public polls. Candidates’ time is scarce and precious in the final days of presidential elections. But both candidates have spent a lot of time in the state; on October 30, both candidates visited North Carolina again.

So why is North Carolina, a state that Trump should comfortably carry and that Democratic presidential candidates have won only twice in the past half-century, in play this year?

Since 2020, North Carolina’s population has increased by nearly 400,000, behind only Texas and Florida. So one hypothesis is that the state’s rapid population growth has shifted the political balance in favor of Democrats. But voter registration statistics tell the opposite story. Since 2020, the number of Democrats registered to vote has fallen by 168,000, while the number of Republicans registered to vote has increased by 118,000, cutting the Democrats’ lead from nearly 400,000 in 2020 to just 113,000 now.

Another plausible hypothesis is a pro-Harris mobilization of the state’s black voters, who make up nearly a quarter of the state’s electorate. Again, the data we have so far goes in the other direction. In 2020, Trump received just seven percent of the black vote. According to the polls, his stock is likely to more than double this year.

A third hypothesis: Traditional Republicans can no longer tolerate Donald Trump and are breaking ranks to support Harris. Again, plausible but inconsistent with the evidence so far. Trump will get about 95% of the Republican vote this year, just like four years ago.

The most plausible hypothesis of all: a huge flow of women angry about the Dobbs decision annulled Roe v. Wade. But in North Carolina, the opposite appears to be the case. According to several highly regarded polls, Harris only breaks even with Trump among women. (Conversely, Trump’s lead among men is remarkably small.)

The evidence we have so far supports only one conclusion: Trump’s lead in North Carolina is smaller than expected, because he is performing significantly worse among white voters than he did four years ago. According to 2020 exit polls, Trump defeated Biden 66% to 33% in this group, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the state’s electorate. This year, his share of the white vote has fallen to 58%, while Harris receives about 40%.

If Marist’s recent North Carolina survey is accurate, this trend extends to the much-discussed education gap in white America. Harris’ share among whites without a college degree is 29%, compared to Biden’s 21%. Four years ago, Biden had the support of only 50% of whites with a college degree, but Harris’ share stands at 61%.

It is possible that when the votes are counted, the North Carolina puzzle will disappear and Trump’s performance will be consistent with both history and his overall national vote. But if the discrepancy persists through Election Day, analysts will wonder why so many white North Carolinians abandoned the candidate of the party that almost always wins the state.