How Kamala Harris Hopes to Take North Carolina Back for the Democrats

At 10 A.M. on the Tuesday after Labor Day, the traditional start of the final sprint to Election Day, ten people in the eastern North Carolina town of Wilson sat in folding chairs, typing numbers into their phones and waiting to see if anyone answered. Many didn't, and some who did had little time for what the callers were offering. The pitch was for the campaign of Kamala Harris , who, until two months ago, was the largely undefined understudy to an unpopular President. "O.K., so you're definitely a strong Trump supporter?" Ruth Thorne, a volunteer, said into her phone. The woman on the other end said yes. Thorne resumed her pitch, but the woman hung up. "She said we're going to Hell," Thorne reported, "and 'I'm not going to listen to your bullshit.' " But earlier, as the negative responses had piled up, Jill Ortman-Fouse, a regional organizing director for the Harris campaign, had reassured her, saying, "Every so often, you get a win."

It's the occasional wins that are driving the Harris campaign to pour money into an effort to attract voters in rural areas of North Carolina, part of a national strategy to mobilize neglected pockets of Democrats and peel away Republican and independent voters in battleground states. Simply the fact that so many volunteers were willing to work the phones on a Tuesday morning, beyond the cities and the suburbs where Democrats have drawn their greatest strength in the state, inspires a quiet confidence in the Harris camp that the effort might work. Twenty minutes into the session, Thorne, who retired from a corporate-lending job in New York and moved to Wilson eighteen months ago, ended a call, smiled, and said, "She's at work, but she's going to vote for Kamala."

In a race that, according to current state polls , could go either way, the potential payoff for Harris is large. Not only is the effort pushing Donald Trump to spend time and money in a state where he once felt sure of victory; there is also the fact that a Harris win there, capturing sixteen electoral votes, would make it highly probable that she would win the Presidency. As a Harris staff member put it in a training Webinar for about fifty volunteers last month, "There is really no way that Donald Trump can make it to the White House if Democrats win North Carolina."

Barack Obama, who won North Carolina in 2008 by a scant fourteen thousand votes, is the only Democrat to win the state since Jimmy Carter did it, in 1976, and Obama failed to repeat the victory in 2012. North Carolina also happens to be the only one of the seven battleground states that Trump won in 2020. But optimists note that Democrats have held the governor's mansion for twenty-seven of the past thirty-one years, and that this year's G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate is Mark Robinson, who has described homosexuality as "filth, " while saying that abortion "is about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down." Trump endorsed Robinson this year, explaining to a crowd in Greensboro that he told him, "I think you're better than Martin Luther King. I think you're Martin Luther King times two." (On Thursday, CNN reported a host of offensive and lewd comments that Robinson allegedly made some years ago on a porn site, including calling King a "huckster" and a "maggot." Robinson denied making the remarks.)

Supporters upbeat about Harris's chances also point out that Joe Biden lost to Trump by just seventy-four thousand votes out of more than five million cast. "If you're talking about a half point among white non-college voters, and you pick up a third of a point with Black mobilization, and you slightly overperform with suburban voters, which is very likely, that's winning and losing in North Carolina," Michael Halle, a senior organizer in Obama's campaigns in North Carolina, told me. He admires the Harris campaign's emphasis on hiring local organizers who know their communities, and he thinks that it's wise to avoid talking about gender, race, and polarizing cultural themes in favor of discussing values and practical issues that make voters say, "It seems like she's talking to me about that."

There is no clearer sign that Harris believes North Carolina is in play than her decision to hold her first post-debate rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro, Democratic strongholds where she hopes to run up the score. "It's going to be a very tight race until the end, and we are the underdogs," she said in Charlotte, before a crowd of about seventy-five hundred people, urging her supporters to press ahead and "fight." A few hours later, in front of seventeen thousand supporters at the Greensboro Coliseum, she touted her proposals to give tax breaks to the parents of newborns and to people starting small businesses, while mocking Trump's comment that, nine years after first calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, he only has " concepts of a plan ."

North Carolina has the country's second-largest rural population, behind Texas. East of Raleigh's Democratic precincts, where the increasingly rural territory turns light blue and then red, lie Nash County and Wilson County (with a combined population of about a hundred and seventy-five thousand). Each went narrowly for Biden during the Covid-hampered election of 2020, when Democrats did little in-person campaigning until the final days. David Berrios oversaw the North Carolina Democratic Party's ground game. One of his biggest regrets, he told me, was the failure to make a broad statewide push for rural voters who might have tipped the state to Biden.

Matt Hildreth, the Harris campaign's new national rural-outreach director, has spent the past dozen years leading Rural Organizing, a progressive nonprofit that develops strategies for communities where Republicans have repeatedly triumphed. "Sometimes I think we have had a message that's too narrow," he told me, pointing out that millions of Democrats of all races and ethnicities live in rural America. "There has been a temptation to run campaigns based on stereotypes. Agriculture is a cornerstone of the economy, but most people work in education, in health care, in manufacturing." How can Harris win people over? "First, we need to show up," he said. He added that the messenger is almost as important as the message, which means recruiting local organizers. "People in these areas know who is gettable. They know what messages work."

The Harris campaign now has more than two hundred and thirty paid staff members in North Carolina, including at least a hundred and seventy assigned to twenty-six field offices around the state. One person who has noticed their activities is Thom Tillis, the Republican senator, who told Semafor , "What we're seeing in North Carolina that we haven't seen for a time, though, is a really well organized ground game by the Democrats." Among the rural counties where the campaign has opened offices is Nash, where the popular Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, spent summers working on his family's tobacco farm and later raised his own family. When organizers launched an office in Wilson County, after Harris entered the race, sixty volunteers showed up.

On the day I visited, amid memorabilia from past campaigns, including an old bumper sticker reading "Gimme Jimmy. Vote Democratic," Thorne and the other volunteers were making phone calls. They wore T-shirts in pastel colors that read "Vote." They had been given scripts and talking points that described Harris as a loyal partner to Joe Biden who has helped produce millions of jobs and lower drug costs while investing in roads and bridges. The sheets suggested ways to reply if a voter they reached raised character, abortion, January 6th, or the economy. There was also an entire page of pointers on Project 2025 , covering topics from book banning and Head Start to abortion pills. Nancy Hawley, the former president of Democratic Women of Wilson County, started a call by describing Harris as a proven leader, a "protector of our American freedoms," and someone who worked side by side with Biden to deliver large sums for infrastructure. The verdict? "She said that she and her husband would have to talk about it. She said, 'He may vote for one, and I may vote for another.' And I wanted to say, 'Yay! Halfway there!' "

According to AdImpact, a data-tracking firm, in August, Trump and his allies nearly doubled the radio and TV advertising spending of Harris and her supporters in North Carolina. From September through Election Day, the firm reported, Democrats have reserved nearly forty-five million dollars' worth of TV ad placements, while Republicans have reserved about forty million. Aiming to show that Harris is a risky choice, a television spot paid for by the super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc., echoes the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped doom Michael Dukakis's chances against George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In the new TV spot , Amanda Kiefer, a nicely dressed, middle-aged white woman in San Francisco, where Harris was the elected district attorney, says that she was robbed, and then nearly run down by the getaway car. "He almost killed me, right over here," she says of the incident, which occurred in 2008. "Kamala just doesn't care about protecting people like me." The suspect , an undocumented immigrant previously convicted of a felony drug charge, had avoided prison by joining a job-training program run by Harris's office, even though he wasn't eligible to hold a job in this country. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Harris blamed a "flaw in the design" of the program, adding, "I believe we fixed it."

One afternoon, in the Nash County town of Rocky Mount, I visited Pastor James D. Gailliard, a former state representative who leads Word Tabernacle Church, with a congregation of four thousand members, almost all of whom are Black, in a converted Home Depot. He is genuinely upbeat about Harris's chances, but said, "In Nash County, white folks struggle to vote for Black candidates." He showed me a stack of pro-Trump mailers that had arrived at his home. The flyers, sent by the North Carolina Republican Party, cast Harris as "failed, weak and dangerously liberal." One says that she is "destroying Medicare and Social Security" through her immigration policies, citing as its source the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank whose executive director accused the Obama Justice Department of fomenting a race war. Another states that she "gutted American oil and gas production," though the United States has set records for oil and gas production under the Biden-Harris Administration. A third claims that she "failed as Border Czar," a title and role she never had.

There is a ready audience for such claims. One morning, I met a retired farmer at a breakfast counter at the intersection of two country roads north of Kenly. "I am a Trump man," he said when I introduced myself. "She's more communist than anything else," he said of Harris. "In four years, we won't have Social Security. Everything all the time goes to the migrants." When I asked him what he likes about Trump, he cited the July 13th assassination attempt : "He's a fighter. He proved that when the Democrats tried to kill him."

In Wilson, Mahalia Witter-Merithew is the owner of Casita Brewing Company, which four years ago sold an I.P.A. called I Voted Today, in a nonpartisan effort to raise money for transportation to get people to the polls. I met her on a Sunday night at her brewery, where four women were painting images of the blue wave that they hope will sweep across North Carolina in November. "I know there are people who don't come here because of what we do," she said of the business, which hosts Pride events and displays an array of yard signs for Democratic candidates in its beer garden. "It's not popular to be a progressive." Witter-Merithew, who recently took charge of the Wilson County Democratic Party, is certain that some voters will oppose Harris because she is a woman, while some young people simply won't vote because they are "disillusioned with the world."

But the women who showed up at the brewery that Sunday believe that this year may break the pattern. Harris has electrified Democrats, especially pro-choice women, and sparked increased voter registration , particularly among younger voters and women of color. Notably, the population of Nash and Wilson counties is about forty per cent Black. (Harris's campaign reported that twenty thousand people have signed up to volunteer in the state, including two thousand who registered the night of her debate with Trump .) Witter-Merithew sees added motivation in the raw memories of waking up to a Trump Presidency in November, 2016, after being so sure that Hillary Clinton would win. "We all got too complacent," Carolyn Sievers, who drove from rural Pitt County to join the sign-painting session, said. "She is not getting Hillary-ed, not this time."

Democrats are also counting on down-ballot candidates to lift Harris's chances. Two years ago, forty-four Republicans ran for the North Carolina legislature in unchallenged races. This year, Democrats are contesting all but three seats. The hope is that these candidates will drive up turnout, to the benefit of Harris, particularly in small towns and rural communities where the Party historically has not fared well. One warm evening, two Democrats in their mid-twenties, Dante Pittman, running for state assembly, and Andressia Ramirez, seeking a school-board seat, set out to knock on doors on Wilson's east side, moving from a working-class precinct to a neighborhood with larger homes and fancier cars. They were working from a list of registered voters who had cast ballots only intermittently. Sure enough, several voters said that they were surprised and pleased that Pittman and Ramirez had showed up. But the effort also revealed challenges facing Harris.