Kamala Harris’ Chances of Taking Swing State North Carolina: New Polls

The battle for North Carolina is turning out to be one of the closest in the 2024 presidential race, with Vice President Kamala Harris continuing to get positive signs in the state that former President Donald Trump has won twice.
Two polls released on Friday showed Harris and Trump tied in North Carolina, one of several battleground states that the candidates are homing in on in the final weeks before election day. Trump won the state and its 16 electoral votes in both 2016 and 2020, although Harris is looking to break the streak—and scandals surrounding the GOP candidate for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race could help push the vice president to victory.
In a survey by CNN and SSRS, based on the responses of 931 registered voters between September 20 and 25, Harris and Trump were tied in the Tar Heel State with 48 percent of the vote each. The same results came from a survey conducted by Meredith Poll between September 17 and 20 that was released Friday—out of 802 likely voters, the candidates were tied at 48 percent a piece.
“Kamala Harris’ candidacy has returned the presidential campaign to essentially where it was in 2020—an election that will be one of the tightest in the country’s history,” Meredith College Poll Director David McLennan said in a report that accompanied the survey.
“A Trump victory in the Electoral College hinges on his winning North Carolina,” McLennan added. “The Trump campaign will continue to pour resources into the state. If Harris can squeak by and win North Carolina, her chances of winning the presidency are greatly enhanced.”
Potentially Harris’ best news of the day came from a Fox News poll, which found that the lead in North Carolina has flipped over the past month. While Trump was ahead by 1 point (50 percent to 49 percent) among registered voters in North Carolina in August, in the same survey conducted between September 20 to 24, Harris was ahead by 2 points, leading the race 50 percent to 48 percent.
By FiveThirtyEight’s tracking, the former president is ahead by just 0.2 percentage points across polling in North Carolina on average as of Friday.
According to pollster Nate Silver’s election forecasts, North Carolina has the potential to be a tipping-point state come November. The top state that candidates are battling for remains Pennsylvania, which per Silver’s estimate has a 32 percent chance of tipping the election in either candidate’s favor. North Carolina, which offers just three fewer electoral votes than Pennsylvania, has an 11 percent chance of doing the same.
Trump’s chance in North Carolina could also be tainted after Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who is running for the state’s open governor seat with Trump’s endorsement, was accused of writing racist and sexist posts to a porn site years before entering the political arena.
Harris’ campaign has jumped on reports regarding Robinson’s past controversial statements by repeatedly tying Trump to the gubernatorial candidate. Several of Robinson’s top staffers have resigned since the first report on the scandal by CNN, although he continues to deny the allegations.
Trump made his first public comments on the controversy surrounding Robinson during a press conference on Thursday, telling reports at his Trump Tower in Manhattan, “Uh, I don’t know the situation.”
In an email to Newsweek on Friday, Matt Mercer, the communications director for the North Carolina Republican Party, said that Trump’s campaign “feels good about its position” in the state, adding that voters “will deliver a third time for President Trump.”
“Every day between now and November 5 is about making phone calls, knocking on doors, and getting our voters to the polls,” Mercer said.
He added that there “is no data that shows a state race” in North Carolina “has any material impact on the Presidential vote,” noting that Trump has won in past elections with a Democrat as governor.
Update 09/26/24, 7:51 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional comment from the North Carolina Republican Party.