Will North Carolina be the big surprise on Election Day?

With its 16 electoral votes, North Carolina is strategically important to both presidential campaigns. If Donald Trump wins there as well as in Georgia and Pennsylvania, he will have the 270 electoral votes he needs. If he doesn’t, he’ll need two other states outside of his Electoral College base. Kamala Harris could win the presidency by carrying all the Blue Wall states. But if she loses one of them, North Carolina offers her the most likely path to victory because Georgia and Arizona are leaning more and more toward Trump in the waning days of the election.¹

Of the seven swing states this year, North Carolina is the most confusing. It is the only swing state that Donald Trump carried in 2020 while losing the national popular vote by 4.4 points. He received 49.9% of the state’s popular vote, compared to 46.9% nationally, while Biden underperformed his national share by 2.7 points in North Carolina, earning just 48.6%. In short, Trump ran 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 the swing states this year, he is expected to be well ahead in North Carolina. But he isn’t. All of them poll aggregates show him with a lead of at most one point, not much better than he performs at the national level.

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

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

Since 2020, North Carolina’s population has increased by approx 400,000behind 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 registered Republicans has increased by 118,000, cutting the Democratic edge 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 only got seven percent of the black vote. This year is according to the opinion pollshis share will probably more than double.

A third hypothesis: Traditional Republicans could no longer stand Donald Trump and are breaking ranks to support Harris. Again, plausible, but inconsistent with the evidence to date. Trump receives approx 95% of the Republican vote this year, as he did four years ago.

The most plausible hypothesis of all: A massive outpouring of angry women Dobbs the decision is overturned Roe v. Wade. But in North Carolina, the opposite appears to be the case. According to several well-regarded pollsHarris only ties 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 doing significantly worse among white voters than he did four years ago. According to the 2020 exit polls, Trump beat Biden 66% to 33% in this group, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the state’s voters. This year, his share of the white vote is down to 58%, while Harris gets about 40%.

If Marist’s latest poll in North Carolina is correct, this trend extends to the much-discussed education gap in white America. Harris’ share of whites without college degrees is 29%, compared to Biden’s 21%. Four years ago, Biden received support from only 50% of whites with college degrees, but Harris’s share is at 61%.

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