Kamala Harris’ new presidential campaign views North Carolina not just as a potential bonus prize on the electoral map this fall, but the possible linchpin in her path to victory against her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.

Democrats started spending money early on in a state they insisted they could win in the presidential contest. Now senior campaign advisers tell McClatchy that Harris’ replacement of President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee has not only scrambled the race, but the map as well, raising the odds that Americans will be waiting Election Night on the results from North Carolina and Arizona — not just Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to learn who has won the White House.

A senior campaign official said that North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s decision on Monday night, publicly withdrawing himself from consideration to join the ticket as Harris’ vice president, had no impact on the calculus driving their strategy in the state.

That strategy, officials said, has been fueled instead by internal data focused on the kinds of new voters moving into the state, modeling the electorate and their propensity to vote, and examining special election and off-year election results — data that holds regardless of Cooper’s choice and that campaign officials believe is far more predictive than head-to-head polling conducted months in advance.

And all of that data is telling Harris’ advisers that North Carolina’s fast-changing electorate will make for a “very competitive” race in November, the official added.

“I don’t really view it as a Blue Wall path, or a Southern path, or a Western path. I don’t think that’s how people should think about this. There are seven or-so states, all of which have been extremely close cycle after cycle,” Dan Kanninen, battleground state director for the Harris campaign, said in an interview.

“They’ve been effectively toss-ups,” Kanninen added. “So I think all seven of those are gonna be close. The difference is, we have built an infrastructure designed to win a close race. The Trump campaign has not.”

DATA DRIVING CONFIDENCE

The Biden campaign — now transformed into the Harris campaign — has made frequent stops in North Carolina. Harris will make her eighth visit of the year and her first as a presidential candidate to the state next week, and will bring her yet-to-be-announced running mate to Raleigh with her.

On paper, Harris faces an uphill battle in a state that has gone for a Democratic candidate for president only twice in the last 50 years: for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Barack Obama in 2008.

Since the last presidential election, North Carolina Republicans have grown their registration numbers by 156,000, while Democrats have shed 126,000 registrants, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections – numbers that on their face appear to challenge Harris in her quest to exceed Biden’s 2020 performance, when he lost the state to Trump by 1.3% of the vote, or 74,000 votes, his narrowest loss that year.

That is just the continuation of a long trend that began in 2016, when Democrats held a voter advantage of nearly 645,000 over Republicans, said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina Republican Party.

“If you want to talk about the impact that Donald Trump has had in North Carolina,” Mercer said, “it’s Democrats shedding half a million voters to either Republicans or unaffiliated voters. That is a stark repudiation of a party that essentially controlled North Carolina for a century.”

But the Harris campaign told McClatchy and N&O their data indicates voter trends across the state are working in their favor, with 57% of newly registered voters in North Carolina since 2020 being millennial age or younger, 34% identifying as Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Pacific Islander, and 38.7% being registered as unaffiliated with either party — three cohorts that are increasingly breaking for Harris in their polling.

Campaign leadership is drilling down at the county level on which districts saw Nikki Haley — Trump’s strongest and most moderate challenger in the Republican primary — overperform her statewide total, with 25% or more of the GOP vote, including in New Hanover, typically seen as a state bellwether, and Union, an historically conservative area.

Even still, Kanninen said registration numbers don’t necessarily predict “the electorate that will show up in the fall,” noting the campaign is planning an aggressive push to maximize the state’s one-stop voting system, where residents can turn up at a polling site both to register and vote at the same time.

“What I will tell you is that the on-the-ground enthusiasm that we see in North Carolina has been incredibly strong — maybe historic — in the past week, and we’ve had a campaign that’s been built to capitalize that, in a way the Trump campaign has simply been absent,” Kanninen said. He pointed to a gathering to train volunteers in Greenville days after Harris entered the race that drew nearly 100 people — a relatively sizable crowd in a small city that surprised the campaign.

While both Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, and Biden both ultimately invested in North Carolina, neither did so until much later in the election cycle, Kanninen noted, placing those campaigns further behind in building the infrastructure he said would be needed to win. The Biden-Harris campaign has been investing in the state since February.

Building out early has allowed the campaign to reach out to a key voting bloc — rural Black voters — earlier than they would have otherwise, and also begin their effort to “cut the margins” of Trump’s support among moderate Republicans and “middle partisans” in rural counties, Kanninen said.

“We put into place infrastructure early — leadership teams on the ground in February and March, building robust teams throughout the spring, now to the point of having 150 staff in North Carolina that will get much, much bigger before the end of the summer,” Kanninen said. “We’re at scale, and building to a greater scale, so that when people start paying much closer attention after the convention and beyond, we’ll have the people, the resources, the volunteers to capitalize on that and drive it, which really matters in a close race.”

ROBINSON ‘MADE POSSIBLE’ BY TRUMP

Confident that the data supports a potential victory, Harris’ campaign has settled on a clear strategy in the state: tying Trump to the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

North Carolinians have a long history of “ticket-splitting,” choosing candidates of different parties down ballot. But Kanninen argued that Robinson was a creature of Trump’s making, indelibly tied to the former president.

“I don’t think it’s a one-off that Mark Robinson exists in a vacuum from Donald Trump. I think he is made possible by Donald Trump,” Kanninen said.

“Donald Trump endorsed him, and vice versa. He spoke at the convention,” Kanninen added. “And I think there’s no escaping the fact that the sort of politics you see from Robinson looks, feels and sounds just like Donald Trump. And I think that will be on the ballot.”

The Harris campaign believes that Robinson’s record — calling LGBTQ+ Americans “filth,” stating he would not compromise on abortion restrictions and quoting Hitler on social media — will prove toxic to moderate Republicans, Republican women and independents, recreating the coalition that challenged Trump and supported Haley in the GOP primary.

“Those voters are really turned off by that sort of toxic MAGA rhetoric, and Mark Robinson is a direct throughline to Donald Trump. They see that as a sort of MAGA ticket, so to speak,” Kanninen said. “I think that is a winning playbook for people who are new to the state, but do not ascribe to those kinds of politics.”

Mercer said the state Republican Party is prepared for the attacks. “It’s a campaign, right? Both sides do their best to work to define their opponent,” he said.

But the Trump campaign does appear to be taking threats to its hold on North Carolina seriously, taking out a television ad buy in the state starting Thursday.

“I think you’re always looking at solidifying your position,” Mercer said of the ad buy, “and, despite having a strong position, you don’t want to get complacent, either. So it’s treating it with the appropriate levels of concern.”

Neither side is expressing exuberant confidence. Kanninen, for his part, acknowledged the race for the state would come down to the wire.

“There’s some political gravity that I think is true in a place like North Carolina, or in some of the other core battlegrounds,” he added. “They’ve been really close races, they’re destined to be really close races.”

McClatchyDC reporter David Catanese contributed reporting.

The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce has privately leaned on the state’s powerful Environmental Management Commission to delay critical PFAS rules, emails obtained under state public records law show, including providing members with the résumé of a scientist who has downplayed the toxicity of the compounds.

At the same time, a crisis involving these “forever chemicals” emerged in rural Randolph County, where drinking water at an elementary school contained the compounds far above federal limits. The school’s groundwater is contaminated, among the issues the proposed rules are meant to address.

North Carolina became one of the nation’s hotspots for the compounds in 2017, when state regulators discovered chemical company Chemours had been discharging a type called GenX into the Cape Fear River, a major drinking water supply. 

More than 300 water systems in North Carolina, serving an estimated 3.4 million people—a third of the state’s population—provide drinking water that contains levels of PFAS above federal limits, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality. These include homes, schools, child care centers and mobile home parks.

Most of the public utilities source their drinking water from groundwater; the rest tap into lakes and rivers.

The drinking water for another 200,000 people who rely on private wells is also contaminated with PFAS at concentrations above the legal limit, DEQ figures show.

Alarmed by the toxicity and pervasiveness of the compounds, DEQ now wants to regulate eight PFAS compounds in surface water and groundwater in hopes of reducing levels before they flow from household taps.

Rulemaking requires several steps, including a public comment period and approval by the EMC before going into effect. The PFAS rules, introduced by DEQ in November, are stuck in an early phase of the process as they await votes from EMC committees.

Members of the public, including managers of downstream water treatment plants, have pleaded with the EMC to make progress. Some conservative EMC members have attributed delays to DEQ. They say the commission’s water quality and groundwater committees haven’t received a full analysis of the rules’ fiscal impacts.

DEQ has given more than a half-dozen presentations to the EMC about the proposal since last year. The agency provided the EMC with a 72-page draft of the fiscal impacts of surface water rules in May. But the final version wasn’t delivered until July and ran 214 pages.

“We want to get the regulatory impact analysis as right as we can before it goes to the full commission and the public,” EMC Chairman J.D. Solomon told Inside Climate News, “so we can get good, meaningful comments back from the public.”

On March 27, Solomon, appointed by GOP House Speaker Tim Moore, spoke to the chamber’s environmental committee. Solomon told Inside Climate News this week that he discussed the EMC’s accomplishments over the past year. The topic of PFAS did come up, Solomon said, but none of the attendees asked for a delay.

“My main message to everybody is, ‘This is coming,’” Solomon said. “‘You’re not going to get out of it. You’re not going to run and hide.’”

Three weeks later, on April 22, the chamber sent a letter to DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser: “It is important that we do not hastily pass regulations without fully accounting for both the positive benefits and potential negative impacts … on the state and its business community.”

Since then, the chamber has provided the EMC with links to talking points about the benefits of PFAS. “This chemical family is essential to mobility, communication, medical treatment, and more,” the chamber wrote on its website, which features the headline: “When it comes to North Carolina’s water, let’s let science dictate our action, not politics.”

In May, Jake Cashion, the chamber’s vice president of government affairs, sent members a résumé for scientist Michael Dourson, who has been retained by chemical companies for studies downplaying the toxicity of the compounds. 

Dourson was also former President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Dourson withdrew his name from consideration after it became clear the U.S. Senate would not confirm him. 

Cashion did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Climate News. Asked via email if the chamber had hired Dourson, and if so, in what capacity, the organization’s spokesperson did not respond.

Solomon said it’s routine for the EMC to “consider different experts” but that he has “not seen anything come to the commission” directly from Dourson.

In June, Dourson wrote an article for the Carolina Journal, a publication of the conservative John Locke Foundation, in which he wrote that North Carolinians faced “little to no risk” from PFAS in their drinking water. 

That contradicts findings by the EPA, federal toxicologists and independent scientists, who have linked PFAS exposure to kidney, prostate, breast, pancreatic and testicular cancer; thyroid and liver disorders; decreased fertility and low birth weight; ulcerative colitis; and a depressed immune system.

The North Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, whose members include Chemours, also opposes the draft rules, which don’t prohibit PFAS manufacturing, but only require facilities to keep the chemicals out of water supplies.

“The NCMA would like the State of North Carolina to be consistent in regulating these substances with our neighboring states and the federal rules, so as to not place North Carolina manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage in cost of manufacturing our products and expanding our operations,” the alliance wrote to DEQ and the EMC.

However, no neighboring states have enacted groundwater rules, according to DEQ. Nineteen other states have some type of groundwater guidance in place. 

The EMC in July instructed DEQ to remove five of eight compounds from its proposed groundwater standards. The remaining three, GenX, PFOA and PFOS, will be considered in September.

Solomon said the proposed standards for the removed compounds were more lax than existing ones, which depend on the lowest level a laboratory can detect. Those are known as practical quantitation levels, and can vary among laboratories, whose sensitivities differ. That can create regulatory uncertainty for industries.

Michael Ellison, an environmental consultant and vice-chairman of the EMC’s Water Quality Committee, has downplayed concerns about PFAS contamination—both privately and publicly.

In private, according to the emails obtained under state records law, Ellison dismissed concerns about the delays, telling a concerned resident in late June that “PFAs have been around for several decades, so any potential cost from another month or two to get the regulations right are likely to be incalculably small.”

At an EMC meeting on July 10, Ellison questioned their toxicity. “There is some difference of opinion about safe levels,” Ellison said, reinforcing points made by Dourson. “For decades we’ve been making and discharging this stuff. How many people have died from PFAS poisoning?” 

Contacted by Inside Climate News, Ellison did not elaborate on his comments.

Ellison worked at DEQ under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration, when the agency weakened many environmental rules. He left the agency in 2017 after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was elected. 

GOP Senate leader Phil Berger appointed Ellison to the EMC in 2023.

The disagreement over PFAS rules escalated last month between Secretary Biser, appointed by Cooper, and conservative members of the EMC. Biser publicly criticized the group’s repeated delays, telling the media on a call: “Do they really need to count body bags before they take action?” 

Commissioner Charlie Carter, an air quality specialist and another Berger appointee, called for her resignation. “Biser’s conduct is absolutely OUTRAGEOUS … time for Biser to apologize or resign!” Carter wrote in an email to his fellow commissioners on July 14.

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Chairman Solomon tried to rein Carter in.

“Charlie, This is over the top. No personal comments are needed on fellow Commissioners, DEQ staff, or DEQ Secretary. Stop it now,” Solomon wrote in an email to the full EMC.  “Everyone, Let’s make these emails stop. Focus on the technical and rulemaking process. We are getting this done—together.”

Biser responded to Carter’s email in a statement provided to Inside Climate News. “It’s my duty as Secretary to protect the health of North Carolina residents and these standards are critical to reducing PFAS in our surface water and groundwater and ensuring residents aren’t paying the entire cost of meeting drinking water standards,” Biser said. 

PFAS in an Elementary School’s Water

Farmer Elementary School near Asheboro, in Randolph County, serves 215 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, about half of them economically disadvantaged. The school sources its drinking water, used to quench the thirst of young children, cook school lunches and make staff coffee, from two wells drilled more than 30 years ago.

In June, DEQ tested the school’s drinking water as part of the agency’s routine assessment to help public water systems comply with EPA limits. The results were stunning. 

Of the 14 types of PFAS detected in Farmer Elementary’s drinking water, two of the most toxic—PFOS and PFOA—were detected at levels 144 and 233 times greater than federal limits, respectively. 

That was driven by contamination in one of the school’s wells, since disconnected. It contained  PFOS at 400 times the proposed state groundwater standards.

A second well on the property also contains several types of PFAS, but only one is above federal limits.

Both the school district and the Randolph County Health Department sent letters to parents and staff about the contamination. DEQ is working with the school on ensuring a new water supply is safe, an agency spokesman said; school starts Aug. 26.

DEQ is still investigating the source and the scope, according to an agency spokesperson. It’s unclear how long children and staff have been drinking contaminated water. 

A commercial site west of the school also had elevated levels of PFAS in its wells, but regulators have not pinpointed a source. Since the compounds linger in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years, the source of the contamination could pre-date both the school and the business.

Therese Vick, research director with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, told Inside Climate News that “the results were shocking and devastating.” 

The cost of providing clean water to North Carolinians whose drinking water supplies are contaminated—and determining who will pay for that treatment—lies at the heart of the fiscal analysis that the EMC committees are now considering.

The Office of State Budget and Management found the groundwater rules’ financial impact would yield net benefits of $604,000 to $3.3 million over 10 years.

An analysis of surface water standards released in July by the office shows that by the year 2060, industrial dischargers and publicly owned wastewater treatment plants would spend $9.6 billion to comply with the new rules.

But accounting for the savings—for water treatment plants and private well owners, health costs and property values—benefits would total $9.96 billion over the same time period. This represents a net surplus of $460,000.

Without the standards, according to DEQ, the health impacts across North Carolina through mid-century would equate to 44,925 cases of health harms. Of these cases, the agency estimated 10,279 could result in death. 

Marion Deerhake, a Cooper appointee, has been on the EMC for seven years, as the scope of contamination and dangers of PFAS in North Carolina have become clearer and more urgent.

“How many more meetings before we act?” Deerhake said at the July meeting. “It must be frustrating for people of the state who have suffered for years, having persistent toxic chemicals in their drinking water.”

North Carolina Medicaid recipients will now have access to over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pills at no cost, starting on Thursday.

In an effort to expand healthcare accessibility in the state, the oral contraceptive Opill will be available starting Thursday in over 300 local and retail pharmacies across the state without a prescription, at no cost for state Medicaid recipients, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina announced on Wednesday in conjunction with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

“North Carolina is working to expand access to healthcare and that includes the freedom to make decisions about family planning,” Cooper said in a press release. “Making birth control easier to get is an important goal and I’m glad that NC Medicaid can take this step.”

The coverage initiative stems from a 2021 law allowing pharmacists to prescribe various contraceptives in accordance with state medical regulations.

According to the Associated Press, North Carolina Medicaid began enlisting pharmacists as providers in early 2024, with the state officially unveiling the Medicaid benefit two weeks ago.

Opill, the first OTC oral contraceptive approved by federal drug regulators, is expected to alleviate cost and access barriers through this initiative, particularly in rural areas where there are fewer healthcare providers, according to state Health and Human Services.

“This new coverage by NC Medicaid demonstrates our commitment to continue to remove barriers to contraception and ensure North Carolinians have access to the services they need to make the best decisions about their health and life,” State Health Director and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Elizabeth Cuervo Tilson said.

Newsweek has reached out to Cooper’s office and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services via email for comment.

In addition, under this initiative, Medicaid-enrolled pharmacies will be able to submit reimbursement claims for birth control pills.

This comes as the state’s Medicaid program serves nearly 3 million residents, with women comprising 56 percent of the enrollees, the AP reported.

“Our goal is to ensure everyone has access to the right contraception and reproductive services at the right time in their community,” NC Health and Human Services Secretary Kody H. Kinsley said in a press release. “This new coverage is part of our ongoing work to invest in child and family well-being by increasing access to health care and ultimately improving maternal and infant outcomes.”

In addition, earlier this month over 500,000 North Carolinians enrolled in the state’s Medicaid expansion program since the program began seven months ago, according to Copper’s office.

According to Cooper’s office, since December 1, 2023, new Medicaid enrollees have filled more than 1.9 million new prescriptions for conditions like heart health, diabetes, seizures and other illnesses.

Meanwhile, the state’s OTC birth control initiative comes after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 escalated concerns over the security of other reproductive rights, including access to contraception.

Last month, the Right to Contraception Act, introduced in 2022 and aimed to enshrine into federal law the right to obtain and use contraceptives, was blocked by Senate Republicans in a 51-39 vote, arguing it was unnecessary and overly broad.

The bill needed 60 votes to defeat a filibuster and move forward in the chambers.

If later approved, the Right to Contraception Act would ensure individuals could access various forms of birth control, such as pills, patches, impacts, condoms, IUDs and sterilization procedures.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned last month of Republican efforts in some states to block access to contraception, saying it was “all the more reason to move to protect contraception at the federal level.”

“To those who think that federal action protecting access to birth control is unnecessary, just look at what’s happening in states like Virginia and Nevada and Arizona, where Republicans are openly blocking these very protections. I would hope that protecting access to birth control would be the definition of an easy, uncontroversial decision here in the Senate. But the vote will tell all,” Schumer said.

Meanwhile, on the Senate floor last month, Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama condemned the Democrats’ legislation efforts as a “summer of scare tactics.”

“This is continuing the campaign of fear-mongering we’ve already seen. Contraception is available in every state across the nation. The goal of my Democratic colleagues right now is to scare the American people, to scare women across our great nation. It’s not that they believe that there’s a problem they’re truly trying to solve. They’re prioritizing their own short-term partisan political interest,” Britt said.