Landon Simonini found himself standing in the middle of a Charlotte highway lane at 2.30 in the afternoon, stuck in an artificial traffic jam while drivers waited for Kamala Harris’s plane to land and the motorcade to clear for the rally later that day.

He was out of his car, because why not? He wasn’t going anywhere soon. His red Make America great again cap stood out among others cursing the traffic gods.

Simonini, born and bred in Charlotte, builds houses. His livelihood depends to some degree on Charlotte’s tremendous growth. But all growth isn’t great, he said.

“This is a traditionally southern state,” Simonini said. “Over 100 people move to Charlotte a day. That is changing the election map. I am born and raised in Charlotte, for 33 years. I have lived here my entire life. I went to school at UNC Charlotte. This is my city. It is a conservative city and I want to keep it that way.”

But in America’s nail-biting 2024 presidential election, North Carolina is now in play. It rejoins a select list of crucial swing states whose voters will decide if Harris becomes America’s first woman of color to win the White House or if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office from which he wreaked political chaos for four years.

Up until about two months ago, the odds didn’t look like this.

Though the margins in North Carolina have been close for decades in presidential races, Obama in 2008 was the last Democrat since 1976 to win the state, eking out a win by three-tenths of a percent. Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to turn North Carolina into an also-ran contest. Every poll through June had Trump beating the president by at least two points, with an average around six.

Party affiliation can only tell so much in a state with a storied history of split-ticket voting. Almost four in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million registered voters choose not to affiliate with a political party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new registered voters in North Carolina while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters.

Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes in 2020, a margin of about 1.3%, his closest winning state, before losing the election. Biden won the four states with closer margins – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.

Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’s ascent scrambled the math. North Carolina’s secretary of state, Elaine Marshall, described the reaction as euphoric.

“It’s such a dramatic contrast from that venom, that poison, that hatred that’s coming from Republican events,” she said. “That contrasts so strongly with the hope and the expectations of the future from Democratic party events.”

The Trump campaign reportedly abandoned its efforts to mount a serious contest in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia recently. That leaves seven states in the political battleground – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and now North Carolina.

Counting electors aside from the remaining non-battleground states, Harris starts with 226 and Trump with 219. North Carolina can deliver 16 electoral votes to the victor. A candidate must have 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Only Pennsylvania has more electors among the remaining battleground states.

A re-energized Democratic electorate has been visible in polling data, which now shows the state as tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolinians who are Black; increased African American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.

But the enthusiasm is far more widespread, and was visible this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies this week, one in Charlotte and another a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice-president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth just this year.

If Harris wins North Carolina and holds in Michigan and Wisconsin, she need only win one of the four other swing states to clinch the presidency. But if Trump wins North Carolina, he can win the presidency with Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin even while losing elector-rich Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Melissa Benton waited on one foot for traffic to clear Tuesday night outside the Greensboro coliseum. Her right knee rested on a scooter, keeping her broken ankle off the ground. She came up from Charlotte for the event, she said.

Benton is an Atlanta-area transplant. She left Georgia out of frustration with how her community had changed with growth. The irony is not lost on her.

Locals complain about the rising cost of living, and skyrocketing housing costs are first on the list. Even people who have weathered the slow-motion collapse of the furniture industry over the last 30 years are being saddled with property tax increases as their homes rise in value.

“Every time I meet a native Charlottean, I’m always like, ‘Listen, I’ve been where you are right now,” Benton said. “I swear I’ll be a great citizen, because I understand what it’s like for new people to come in.” She has a keen eye on municipal problems, services and infrastructure. “But it’s also keeping Charlotte Charlotte, and we’ve lost sight of that in some big cities.”

Affordable housing is a crisis in Charlotte, much like it is in Atlanta and Greensboro and most large cities in the US. But in North Carolina, it’s not just an urban problem. Lenoir – pronounced “len-OR” – up at the edge of the Brushy mountain range of the Appalachians, is in one of 73 rural counties in the state, and it has a problem with market rate housing too. About a third of North Carolina’s voters live in rural counties.

The Democratic party has a field office in Lenoir. The lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, held a campaign event there on Wednesday for his gubernatorial run. Marshall, the secretary of state, held a discussion there last week. No part of the state can escape battleground politics today.

Democrats have long expected a brutal fight in North Carolina, and have been investing time, money and personnel into the state for the last year.

“The Democratic party is certainly trying to reach young people,” Marshall said. It’s also trying hard to connect with young women who may have abortion politics on their mind. “They’ve got Sunday school, and they’ve got work, getting the kids fed and kind of stuff. So suburban mom, working professional women, you know.”

Harris’s visit to North Carolina for her first rallies since the debate is no accident. North Carolina is that important. Trump has planned a rally in Wilmington on North Carolina’s coast next week. JD Vance, his running mate, will be in Raleigh next week as well. The Republican campaign has been sending surrogates to local events regularly. Two weeks from now, former housing secretary Ben Carson will speak at the Salt and Light conference of the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition.

The Democratic party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staff, according to the campaign. The choices of placement for some of the offices, such as rural Wilson county in the state’s “Black belt” and Lenoir in western mountain country, speak to movement away from a focus on high-density urban territory that’s friendly to Democrats.

Democrats are also using their significant financial advantages in fundraising to swaddle broadcast and social media in a blanket of Harris advertising. Organizers say they’ve been on the air with ads for a year. Ad tracking firm AdImpact notes that Democrats have reserved about $50m in ad buys through the end of the cycle, with particular attention paid to Black and Spanish-language media outlets. Trump only began advertising in earnest in August.

But Republican campaign leaders view much of that effort as artificial.

“We feel like, from our standpoint, that the race is a toss-up, but we feel like we still have an advantage,” said Matt Mercer, director of communications for the North Carolina GOP. “One of the big reasons is our leadership. You know, we didn’t abandon a ground game at any level in 2020. What you’re seeing from Democrats is an effort to catch up.”

The Republican campaign is decentralized, Mercer said, accommodating far-flung efforts in a state that’s 560 miles wide from Manteo in the east to Murphy in the west. “You win statewide by going across the entire state, and that means going west of I-77 and east of I-95.”

“For every person that’s moving to Charlotte or Raleigh, you’ve also got retired couples moving to the coast, or you’ve got military deciding to stay in the state,” Mercer said. “You know, I think Democrats kind of fall into this trap where they think growth is all going to benefit them, and they’re just missing it.”

The GOP dominates North Carolina’s legislative branch, which has enough Republicans to override a gubernatorial veto. But North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat and the state has elected a Democratic governor for most of the last 30 years, even as it has delivered wins to Republican presidents.

Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has maintained a consistent lead over Robinson throughout the year. Robinson is an unusually controversial candidate even by standards set in the Trump era, with a litany of offensive and antisemitic attacks made on social media or in public statements.

Robinson has tried to keep a low profile over the last few months, even as Stein has used his financial edge to batter Robinson with ads drawing primarily on the lieutenant governor’s own words. In recent weeks, Robinson has taken to the campaign trail, meeting with small groups in small towns far away from urban centers, haranguing the media and calling Stein’s ads deceptive. “Josh Stein is a liar,” he said, demanding that a news reporter convey that message to his opponent, along with a demand for a debate.

Stein has, so far, declined.

James Adamakis watched a Robinson stemwinder from a seat at Countryside BBQ in the small town of Marion, North Carolina, on Tuesday. It’s a popular stop for politicians in North Carolina’s rural mountains. A picture of Barack Obama’s visit in 2011 hangs proudly on the wall next to the cash register.

Adamakis works in juvenile justice. The military veteran supports Republicans because they’re tougher on crime he said. But he acknowledges that even people who share his political values may vote in peculiar ways in North Carolina.

He described the conversion of one of his friends into a Republican. “It was the economics, where he just kept seeing the inflation and buying groceries and everything,” Adamakis said. “He was like, why is the media and Biden saying that it’s good when it’s not? I think that the economy cuts across lines.

“Everybody you meet in western North Carolina still may vote Democrat, but they still don’t like that.”

But political diversity is about more than race in North Carolina. The economy of a place like Research Triangle Park near Durham is fundamentally different from the banking sector in Charlotte, or the tourism of the southern coast, or mountain towns struggling to reinvent themselves.

“It might be easier in my job if there were just one [swing voter], but there’s not,” Mercer said. And I think that dynamism is what makes the state so interesting and so hard to win, and why you truly need to understand the entire state.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh returns Sunday to where it all ended for him, and also where it began.

He was a 38-year-old quarterback, hoping for a few more years in the NFL, when he joined the Carolina Panthers for the 2001 season. He didn’t believe his career was at an end. After all, he was throwing passes to standout rookie Steve Smith, but the football gods had other ideas, as he recalled.

Although he never played in a game for the Panthers, the franchise left an indelible mark on Harbaugh and, in the end, it led him to a different career path. It was then and there that he began to realize he could turn to coaching, following in the shoes of his successful father, Jack.

So, Harbaugh began hanging out in the film room long after practice ended and his teammates headed for home. He sat on the floor and watched and listened as the coaches broke down film and discussed schemes and ways in which they could exploit their opponents while covering for their own shortcomings.

Harbaugh also met Greg Roman, a Panthers assistant coach who would join him at a number of stops over the years, including this season with the Chargers. Earlier this week, Roman remembered Harbaugh as an attentive student, a man who might become an excellent coach one day.

“I met Greg in Carolina, yeah, that’s as profound as anything,” Harbaugh said recently. “Nothing more profound than meeting Greg Roman in Carolina. He was an offensive line assistant. I was at the point where I was coming in new. I was in the office late, just watching the coaches.”

Said Roman, recalling his first impressions of Harbaugh: “He was always in the film room, always. He’d be sitting in our special teams coach’s office on the floor watching film with the special teams coach at night. What does that tell you? A quarterback doing that? He was grooming himself to become a coach.”

It wouldn’t be long before Harbaugh turned in his helmet and pads.

“I didn’t get into a game, it was time to coach,” Harbaugh said, chuckling at the memory. “It was time to go into coaching. This was the football gods explaining to me that we’re not going to play anymore. We’re going to need you in coaching. In my mind, I could still do this. I’ve got at least two more years.”

Nope.

Jack Harbaugh’s notion that when you think you’re done, when you can’t fathom the idea of going onto the field for practice or for games or for the routine preparation of a football game, then you go for another two years. Jim Harbaugh recalled his dad’s words, but he was done. There would not be an additional two years.

Jim Harbaugh spent his final days throwing passes to Smith, a superstar in the making, and running the Panthers’ scout team. When the end came, he was prepared for it. The then-Oakland Raiders offered him a job as a quarterbacks coach and he jumped at it for the 2002 season.

After two seasons, he became the head coach at the University of San Diego, a homecoming of sorts after he had played in 1999-2000 with the Chargers. After stops at Stanford and the San Francisco 49ers, he landed at the University of Michigan.

The Chargers hired him in January. Roman joined him in Los Angeles, accepting the job as defensive coordinator.

“That’s a go-to guy,” Harbaugh said of Roman. “He’s excited to teach. Football tips. It was enchanting just being around him and listening to him talk and explain and teach. He could take a complex football play, scheme, and explain it in 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, max, and I felt like I knew it inside and out. He’s just got that ability to teach. This guy was a chess player, he would probably be thinking seven, eight moves ahead. That’s how he is as a football coach.”

ROSTER MOVES

The Chargers elevated safety Tony Jefferson and linebacker Shaquille Quarterman from the practice squad. Jefferson could fill in if Alohi Gilman can’t play because of a knee injury. Gilman was listed as doubtful to play Sunday against Carolina.

CHARGERS (1-0) at PANTHERS (0-1)

When: 10 a.m. Sunday

Where: Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte

TV/radio: Ch. 2; Paramount+/98.7 FM; 105.5 FM/94.3 FM (Spanish)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ nominee for vice president, plans to visit Asheville Tuesday for a political event, according to a campaign official.

His trip kicks off a week of North Carolina campaign events that includes visits from the Republican nominees, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, who will be in Raleigh the same day that Walz is in Asheville.

It will be the second time Walz has visited North Carolina since August, when Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz as her running mate.

Campaign officials have not yet provided further details about Walz’s visit on Tuesday.

During his last visit, to Raleigh, he stopped for milkshakes at Cook Out with Gov. Roy Cooper before visiting a campaign office and a fundraiser.

The Trump campaign said Trump and Vance plan to host rallies to focused on the state of the economy. Trump will visit Wilmington on Saturday.

Michael Zhadanovsky, the North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign’s rapid response director, said Trump and Vance are campaigning on an extreme agenda “that would rip away North Carolinians’ freedoms and raise taxes for working families across the state.”

“Voters here don’t want Trump and his MAGA allies like Robinson trampling on our rights and freedoms,” Zhadanovsky said. “When Trump and Vance come to Wilmington and Raleigh next week, we’re going to make it clear: we’re not going back.”

The multiple visits in a single week highlight the importance North Carolina is playing in the upcoming election.

Trump and Vance have increased their visits to the Tar Heel state since Harris became Trump’s opponent for president on July 21.

When Trump faced off against President Joe Biden, he often led in North Carolina’s polls, sometimes by double digits. But when Harris launched her campaign, the polls began to narrow.

On Monday, a poll from Quinnipiac University showed Harris three points ahead of Trump in North Carolina. Harris visited three days later, on Thursday, holding campaign rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro.

Democrats have spent more than a year investing in North Carolina as a key battleground state. While Democratic presidential candidates rarely win in North Carolina, the margins have narrowed. Trump carried North Carolina in 2020 by the smallest margin of any state he won.

Democrats have worked to flip North Carolina blue, trying to secure the state’s 16 electoral votes.