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!’ ”