President Trump’s opportunity to recapture North Carolina is “on a knife’s edge,” pollsters and strategists say.
Trump won the state against Hillary Clinton by less than 4% of the vote in 2016, but demographic shifts may this year shift the balance in Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s favor.
“We’ve added about a million new voters since 2016,” said David McLennan, director of the statewide Meredith Poll. “It’s not the same state that the president ran in four years ago and won.”
McLennan pointed to “new voters of color, younger voters, and people living in urban areas,” adding that compared to 2016, Trump seems to have lost traction in the suburbs.
“They were key to the president winning four years ago, and it looks like they may help Joe Biden in this year,” McLellan said.
But one longtime political organizer in the state, a Republican, said that Republican voters show more reticence today to share their vote publicly than in the past.
“Go back to 2012, and I’d say, was it Obama? Was it Romney? and they wouldn’t really have a qualm saying which one they would vote for,” he said. “Nowadays, it’s much more of a secret.
“I’d say probably a solid 20 to 30% of them whisper to me, like six feet away, they’re whispering loud,” he added. “They don’t want to say it too loud. There’s nothing necessarily in their yards, one way or the other,” indicating their support, he said. “The people that are voting for Biden, they have no problem telling you that they’re voting for Biden.”
He said that the suburban swing vote is still expected to be the “flex point” in this election. “I’m looking at it as a dogfight down to the end.”
The state has 15 electoral college votes and could prove crucial to Trump’s reelection chances, as well as to Republican control of the United States Senate. The Senate race pitting incumbent Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, against Democrat Cal Cunningham, has heightened the focus on the state.
According to a RealClearPolitics average, Biden holds a 3.3 percentage point advantage over Trump in North Carolina, smaller than the 4.9 percentage point lead the former vice president averages in key battlegrounds.
Biden’s advantage in the latest polls either falls within each survey’s margin of error, or just a hair outside.
New York Times/Siena College pollsters surveyed 627 likely voters between Oct. 9 and 13, with Trump at 42% and Biden at 46%, a four percentage point lead that is within the poll’s plus or minus 4.5 percentage point margin of error.
“The outcome is on a knife’s edge,” one veteran columnist said and pointed to the “so-called shy Trump vote” as an uncertainty that makes it harder than usual to predict North Carolina’s vote.
“I don’t think it’s large, but in a razor-thin race, it could make a difference,” he added.
Early voting kicked off Thursday, but this person warned against drawing conclusions on the state of the race from these numbers.
“One reason people vote early is so they stop getting mail, at least in North Carolina,” he said. “Do you want to draw a conclusion about which party is going to win based on the number of people who would rather have a relatively undisturbed October? I don’t think so.”
Trump is ignoring the polls telling Fox News Thursday his campaign was leading.
“The polls were wrong last time, and they’re more wrong this time,” he said. “Oh, these polls are much better than I had last time. Last time I was down in nine states, I ended up winning all nine of them.”
Trump added: “I think we’re doing great in Pennsylvania, we’re doing great in North Carolina, we’re doing really good in Michigan. No, we’re doing great. I think we’re going to have a big victory.”
