North Carolina
How Kamala Knocks Out Trump
Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 12.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
When CNN reported last week that Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor, had once called himself a “black NAZI” on a porn site, the political world came to one quick consensus: He was totally cooked in his race for governor. (Most of his staff promptly quit.) What was less obvious was how the news would budge the deadlocked presidential race there. At Kamala Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, and on the ground in Raleigh, Democratic operatives saw a clear opportunity to gain an edge in a state only one Democrat has won at the presidential level since Jimmy Carter. When Priorities USA, an influential Democratic super-PAC, finished running its latest private North Carolina forecast on Sunday, just days after the CNN report, it had Harris at 50.3 percent and Trump at 49.7.
No one in Wilmington or Washington, let alone Charlotte, expects Harris to open up much of a lead in a state that often looks more burgundy than purple, but Harris’s team began making aggressive moves to flood North Carolinians with reminders of Robinson’s extremism, and his latest scandal, within hours of the news — and to tie him to Donald Trump.
Along with Georgia, North Carolina represents the second-biggest electoral-vote haul of all the battlegrounds. Joe Biden, who’d lost it by just over a point in 2020, set out to win it when he launched his 2024 campaign. His troops invested in an ambitious field and advertising operation there, recognizing it as the most obvious opportunity to flip a state Trump won four years ago. As Biden struggled, though, North Carolina slipped further from his grasp than any other core battleground; by the time he dropped out this summer, Trump held a seven-point lead there in the FiveThirtyEight polling average.
It’s been a different story entirely since Harris took over the ticket. Since then, the same polling average has never shown a gap of more than one point between her and Trump. For over a year, the vice-president had been visiting the state regularly, occasionally at the invitation of Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat with whom she has been friends since they were both attorneys general. The national vibe shift in her favor was perhaps the most pronounced in North Carolina, where nearly 25,000 new volunteers have signed up since she became the nominee and voter registration has spiked, especially among women, and women of color in particular. (People who have spoken with Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair, say she appears especially eager to win the state back after losing it narrowly as Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. He’d won it in 2008, when she was his battleground-states director.)
While Harris’s political brain trust put North Carolina back on the front burner the week she took over for Biden, in their eyes Robinson’s implosion has only made the opportunity more ripe. It’s hardly one they can afford to pass up. The most important state this year is Pennsylvania, but her campaign does not believe it can count on winning it since it’s so close and both campaigns are pursuing it so aggressively. If she can’t win Pennsylvania, she’ll very likely need either Georgia or North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes to reach 270, and Georgia is looking like a tougher climb even though Biden won it in 2020. (A New York Times–Siena College poll this week had Trump up four in Georgia but just two in North Carolina.) Meanwhile, Trump’s path back to the presidency is exceedingly difficult without North Carolina.
The two candidates and their running mates visited the state eight times in the first three weeks of September alone. And though Democrats have more ad money booked in North Carolina than Republicans in the home stretch of the race, it’s the only battleground where the Trump campaign itself has outspent Harris’s since she got in the race, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
For months, the Harris team had been “expecting a close race, and trying to win a close race,” in the words of Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s director of battleground states, building a campaign to fight for marginal votes. Much of the campaign’s messaging already tied Robinson — who was infamous for being a Holocaust denier and arguing that abortion is “about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down” — to Trump.
“We knew this a year ago, we knew this a month ago: We recognize that Mark Robinson was the example of what Donald Trump’s politics have done to the Republican Party and to America,” Kanninen told me. Since last week’s revelations, less engaged voters have tuned in. “It doesn’t represent to me a shift in the imperatives or the strategy, but it does mean there is a hotter spotlight on that extremism,” he said.
The Harris campaign didn’t announce a new infusion of cash to North Carolina, but its immediate shift in attention and energy has been obvious to voters, activists, and operatives in the state. Pro-Harris forces wasted no time last week in trying to make sure hardcore Democrats, wavering independents, and conservatives associate Robinson with Trump and vice versa. The Democratic National Committee, for one, paid for billboards around the state showing the pair of Republicans together, highlighting Trump’s extensive praise for Robinson (whom he’s called “Martin Luther King on steroids”). Harris’s campaign, too, started circulating an ad explicitly tying the pair together, showing footage of them side by side. Yet the ad’s focus isn’t on Robinson’s newly revealed comments, rather on his harsh right-wing views on abortion. On the ground, the Harris operation immediately started planning press events aimed at getting more coverage of Robinson’s extreme views and, especially, his ties to Trump.
Since last week, Harris staffers have argued that Robinson’s continued outrages help their cause with both Black voters and moderate white ones in the suburbs. For months, the campaign had been working on its appeal to the latter group by focusing largely on abortion, and by specifically reaching out to the nearly one-quarter of voters in the GOP primary in March who chose Nikki Haley over Trump. This group has been bombarded with reminders of Trump’s and Robinson’s far-right views, but also those of congressman Dan Bishop, the former sponsor of the state’s infamous HB2 anti-trans “bathroom bill” who’s running for lieutenant governor, and Michele Morrow, the superintendent candidate who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and called for Barack Obama’s execution. Now the Harris camp is turning up the volume on this messaging, previewing in a campaign memo that it would be specifically outlining how Trump and Robinson share a backing of abortion bans, their wish to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and their joint hope to gut the Department of Education.
As the campaign enters its final stretch, Wilmington is looking for even more ways to make sure its many staffers on the ground in North Carolina can disseminate the Robinson news — and reminders of his Trump association — to every last voter who may be undecided. “This is when people start paying attention, and all of a sudden there’s this conversation in real life, in stride, about the election. And that’s where the presence we’ve had on the ground matters,” Kanninen said.
Democrats’ imagined path to victory in North Carolina is straightforward but relies on maximum turnout from a few different groups and likely some Republican discouragement. Over the last decade, many liberal hopes for the state have rested on demographic change, especially on the influx of highly educated left-leaners moving in, particularly to big cities like Charlotte and Raleigh. Now Harris is hoping for higher margins of victory — and blockbuster voting rates — in those metropolitan areas. Yet she is also expected to rely largely on nearly two years of organizing work led by Anderson Clayton, the state party’s 26-year-old chair, who has been adamant about building and maintaining a presence in rural and traditionally deep-red parts of North Carolina, too. The idea is not to win there, but to cut into Trump’s margin of victory in places such as Statesville, the county seat of Iredell County, which Trump won by a two-to-one margin in 2020.
Still, most of their hope is pinned on gains in the fast-growing suburbs, where Democrats have been making particular inroads in recent years by focusing on the fall of Roe and MAGA extremism. The playbook worked to great effect in 2022, and even more in elections since then. Democratic operatives in the state point often to unexpected off-year party gains in local offices — like flipping the mayor’s office in Huntersville and a state house seat in Cabarrus County, both outside of Charlotte — as reason for optimism.
While many local Democrats insist they see no evidence of a serious Trump organizing plan, Harris has been running ads in Black-focused and Spanish-language media for months, and has established 26 field offices across the state. Among these are outposts in highly valuable suburbs like those in Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties, and others in far more conservative areas like Gaston County, which Trump won by 28 points four years ago. (Catawba College professor Michael Bitzer told my colleague Benjamin Hart this week that the infrastructure is “the most ambitious ground-game operation I’ve seen since Obama’s ’08 campaign.”) And Harris’s operation is stacked with North Carolina experience: Kanninen, for one, helped run Hillary Clinton’s operation there in 2016, and has made sure this operation is more robustly organized across the state than Clinton’s had been. On the ground, Harris’s team is led largely by veterans of Cooper’s campaigns and governor’s office, including senior advisers Scott Falmlen and L.T. McCrimmon, and Dory MacMillan, the campaign’s state communications director.
Yet the irony is that Cooper’s repeated success in the state is one reason there’s no clear consensus about how much Robinson’s collapse will actually help Harris. The state’s voters have a decades-long history of electing Democratic governors along with Republican presidents — Cooper, who was elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 while the state twice went for Trump, is only the latest example.
Local operatives agree on how continued revelations about Robinson’s past could theoretically help Harris: by convincing some undecided suburbanites of GOP madness, but mostly by discouraging conservatives from voting at all. Yet many are skeptical that this would necessarily translate up the ballot, especially if it seems like Attorney General Josh Stein, Robinson’s opponent, will win easily and Robinson poses little threat. Plus, while many Democratic operatives close to Harris have firsthand experience in campaigns defeating Trump-inspired extremists, most are quick to acknowledge those candidates’ unpopularity seldom dents Trump’s own appeal to his voters. “In normal times, the Robinson thing would be a killer up and down the Republican ticket,” said Bruce Thompson, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Raleigh. But since the CNN report, “It’s hard to feel a tide shift, because it’s going to be decided on the margins. Trump supporters have proven it does not matter what he does, or who he’s associated with.” Still, Thompson said, there’s always a good chance that some groups of Republicans “get frustrated and don’t show up.”
Republicans have mostly scoffed at the idea that Robinson could bring Trump down. But the former president himself isn’t taking any chances.
Just two days after Robinson was revealed to have called himself a Nazi and advocated for reinstating slavery, Trump touched down in Wilmington. Robinson had been at Trump’s side in his appearances in the state for months, and spoke at Trump’s convention in Milwaukee. This time, though, Robinson wasn’t invited and Trump never mentioned his name.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – The recent government shutdown highlighted a continuing battle over healthcare, specifically the extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies.
The outcome of this debate in Washington could significantly impact how much North Carolinians pay for their health insurance.
For 67-year-old Gerry Fiesler and his 62-year-old wife, Kelly, healthcare is essential. Gerry Fiesler is on Medicare, but Kelly Fiesler, who has an autoimmune disease and Crohn’s disease, relies on the ACA Marketplace.
Thanks to expanded federal subsidies, they currently pay just $60 a month for Kelly Fiesler’s coverage. However, if these subsidies expire, their bill could jump to over $450 – a 750% increase.
“It’s a good program. It really is. The insurance is good. It was affordable,” Kelly Fiesler said. “I think because of the income I reported was a little more they put us in a tier. I think the deductibles are higher a lot of changes. I haven’t even approved the plan yet for 100%.”
Facing rising costs for food, gas, and other necessities, the Fieseler’s have made the difficult decision to sell their retirement home of eight years.
“We have to do that, it’s the only way we may survive this. It’s about survival. I don’t know how long it’s going to last with us with the money and all. I may have to go back to work,” Gerry Fiesler said.
The number of North Carolinians insured through the ACA Marketplace has doubled since before the pandemic, from 500,000 to nearly 1 million, largely due to the affordability subsidies provided.
Nicholas Riggs, Director of the NC Navigator Consortium, warns of the consequences if subsidies are not extended.
“Without the enhanced subsidies, people are seeing their premiums jump two to three times what they are right now,” Riggs said “And not only that, but for individuals who are above 400% of the federal poverty level, they will have to pay full price for marketplace plans if the enhanced subsidies aren’t extended.”
Who currently qualifies for enhanced subsidies?
- Individuals making up to $62,000
- Couples making up to $84,000
- Families of four making up to $128,000
If subsidies expire, the previous rules will return, potentially eliminating eligibility for many middle-income households, including those who are too young for Medicare and do not qualify for Medicaid, yet cannot afford to go without medical care.
“The American dream is slowly getting out of reach for most people, I think,” Gerry Fieseler said.
Riggs advised against panic, stating that even if enhanced subsidies expire, other subsidies and marketplace plans will still be available.
“There are four different categories of plans. There’s bronze, which covers 60% of out-of-pocket costs, silver, which roughly covers 70% of out-of-pocket costs, gold, 80%, and platinum, 90%. So we always want to make sure that folks do know that there are health coverage options available in the marketplace, regardless of what’s going to happen with the subsidies,” Riggs said. “And it is much better to protect yourself against a health emergency and have coverage, even if it’s a bronze plan, than to go without coverage at all. So explore your options.”
The decision by Congress will determine whether hundreds of thousands in North Carolina maintain their health coverage. Navigators recommend checking options early and not panicking.
Copyright 2025 WBTV. All rights reserved.
North Carolina
Federal immigration agents will expand enforcement action in North Carolina to Raleigh, mayor says
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Federal immigration authorities will expand their enforcement action in North Carolina to Raleigh as soon as Tuesday, the mayor of the state’s capital city said, while Customs and Border Protection agents continue operating in Charlotte following a weekend that saw arrests of more than 130 people in that city.
Mayor Janet Cowell said Monday that she didn’t know how large the operation would be or how long agents would be present. Immigration authorities haven’t spoken about it. The Democrat said in a statement that crime was lower in Raleigh this year compared to last and that public safety was a priority for her and the city council.
“I ask Raleigh to remember our values and maintain peace and respect through any upcoming challenges,” Cowell said in a statement.
U.S. immigration agents arrested more than 130 people over the weekend in a sweep through Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, a federal official said Monday.
The movements in North Carolina come after the Trump administration launched immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles and Chicago. Both of those are deep blue cities in deep blue states run by nationally prominent officials who make no secret of their anger at the White House. The political reasoning there seemed obvious.
But why North Carolina and why was Charlotte the first target there?
Sure the mayor is a Democrat, as is the governor, but neither is known for wading into national political battles. In a state where divided government has become the norm, Gov. Josh Stein in particular has tried hard to get along with the GOP-controlled state legislature. The state’s two U.S. senators are both Republican and President Donald Trump won the state in the last three presidential elections.
The Department of Homeland Security has said it is focusing on North Carolina because of so-called sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and immigration agents.
But maybe focusing on a place where politics is less outwardly bloody was part of the equation.
The White House “can have enough opposition (to its crackdown), but it’s a weaker version” than what it faced in places like Chicago, said Rick Su, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law who studies local government, immigration and federalism.
“They’re not interested in just deporting people. They’re interested in the show,” he said.
The crackdown
The Trump administration has made Charlotte, a Democratic city of about 950,000 people, its latest focus for an immigration enforcement surge it says will combat crime — despite local opposition and declining crime rates. Residents reported encounters with immigration agents near churches, apartment complexes and stores.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that Border Patrol officers had arrested “over 130 illegal aliens who have all broken” immigration laws. The agency said the records of those arrested included gang membership, aggravated assault, shoplifting and other crimes, but it did not say how many cases had resulted in convictions, how many people had been facing charges or any other details.
The crackdown set off fierce objections from area leaders.
“We’ve seen masked, heavily armed agents in paramilitary garb driving unmarked cars, targeting American citizens based on their skin color,” Stein said in a video statement late Sunday. “This is not making us safer. It’s stoking fear and dividing our community.”
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles said Monday she was “deeply concerned” about videos she’s seen of the crackdown but also said she appreciates protesters’ peacefulness.
“To everyone in Charlotte who is feeling anxious or fearful: You are not alone. Your city stands with you,” she said in a statement.
The debate over crime and immigration
Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County have both found themselves part of America’s debates over crime and immigration, two of the most important issues to the White House.
The most prominent was the fatal stabbing this summer of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train, an attack captured on video. While the suspect was from the U.S., the Trump administration repeatedly highlighted that he had been arrested previously more than a dozen times.
Charlotte, which had a Republican mayor as recently as 2009, is now a city dominated by Democrats, with a growing population brought by a booming economy. The racially diverse city includes more than 150,000 foreign-born residents, officials say.
Lyles easily won a fifth term as mayor earlier this month, defeating her Republican rival by 45 percentage points even as GOP critics blasted city and state leaders for what they call rising incidents of crime. Following the Nov. 4 election, Democrats are poised to hold 10 of the other 11 seats on the city council.
While the Department of Homeland Security has said it is focusing on the state because of sanctuary policies, North Carolina county jails have long honored “detainers,” or requests from federal officials to hold an arrested immigrant for a limited time so agents can take custody of them. Nevertheless, some common, noncooperation policies have existed in a handful of places, including Charlotte, where the police do not help with immigration enforcement.
In Mecklenburg County, the jail did not honor detainer requests for several years, until after state law effectively made it mandatory starting last year.
DHS said about 1,400 detainers across North Carolina had not been honored since October 2020, putting the public at risk.
For years, Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden pushed back against efforts by the Republican-controlled state legislature to force him and a handful of sheriffs from other urban counties to accept ICE detainers.
Republicans ultimately overrode a veto by then-Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper late last year to enact the bill into law.
While McFadden has said his office is complying with the law’s requirement, he continued a public feud with ICE leaders in early 2025 that led to a new state law toughening those rules. Stein vetoed that measure, but the veto was overridden.
Republican House Speaker Destin Hall said in a Monday post on X that immigration agents are in Charlotte because of McFadden’s past inaction: “They’re stepping in to clean up his mess and restore safety to the city.”
Last month, McFadden said he’d had a productive meeting with an ICE representative.
“I made it clear that I do not want to stop ICE from doing their job, but I do want them to do it safely, responsibly, and with proper coordination by notifying our agency ahead of time,” McFadden said in a statement.
But such talk doesn’t calm the political waters.
“Democrats at all levels are choosing to protect criminal illegals over North Carolina citizens,” state GOP Chairman Jason Simmons said Monday.
___
Sullivan reported from Minneapolis and Robertson from Raleigh, North Carolina. Associated Press writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Maryland and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
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Around North Carolina
1. Driver that struck, killed girl in 2022 Raleigh Christmas parade pleads guilty
A few days short of the three-year anniversary of when 11-year-old Hailey Brooks died after being hit by a truck in the Raleigh Christmas Parade, the driver pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 120 days, according to court records. Landen Glass, who was 20 years old at the time, lost control after his brakes failed, police said.
2. ECU, N.C. State boards approve hikes for in-state tuition
Leaders at East Carolina University and N.C. State have approved 3% tuition increases for incoming students. The N.C. State board of trustees gave approval Friday to the increase, which would take effect in fall 2026, a spokesman for the school said. ECU’s trustees approved the tuition increase for new undergraduate students beginning in the 2026-27 academic year, a university spokesperson said. The tuition increases at both schools must be approved by the UNC System’s Board of Governors.
3. Funeral to be held Monday for WakeMed officer killed in line of duty
Services for WakeMed Officer Roger Smith will start at noon Monday at Providence Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Smith, 59, was shot and killed Saturday, Nov. 8, during a struggle at the WakeMed Garner HealthPlex, officials said.
Around The Nation
1. Trump drops tariffs on beef, coffee, tropical fruit as pressure builds on consumer prices
2. Trump to ask DOJ to probe Epstein ties to Clinton, Summers, Hoffman, JPMorgan
3. Experts say legislative path forward to lower health care costs remains unclear
The school year can look much different for children matriculating through the state’s foster care system. The National Center for Education Statistics showed only 57% of North Carolina students in foster care graduate high school compared with about a 90% graduation rate for their peers. Nita Nwakuche is proud to have graduated from high school as a product of the system, considering how much she had to overcome.
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