Former President Donald Trump is leading Vice President Kamala Harris in the key battleground state of North Carolina, a recent Fabrizio Ward (R)/Impact Research (D) survey for AARP found.
In a two-way race, Trump leads Harris by three percentage points, garnering 50 percent support to Harris’s 47 percent support.
With a full field — including third party candidates — Trump has a two-point edge over Harris, leading with 48 percent to Harris’s 46 percent. Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver sees one percent support, as does Green Party candidate Jill Stein and the Justice for All Party’s Cornel West.
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In a two-way race, Trump leads Harris among independents by four percentage points. That lead reduces to three in a full field including the third party candidates.
Other takeaways from the survey include:
•Trump is ahead among voters 50+ by a 9-point margin, which is the same among voters 50-64 and 65+. Voters 18-34 are Harris’s best age group, and they give her a double-digit lead.
• Both candidates are winning about 9-in-10 of their party’s voters, with Independents narrowly tilting toward Trump.
• There is a gender gap with Trump up among men by 11-points, and Harris ahead with women by 7.
The survey was taken September 11-17, 2024, among 600 likely voters. It has a +/- 4 percent margin of error. This poll follows a discussion on Breitbart News Saturday with Eric Daugherty, assistant news director of Florida’s Voice News, who noted that Democrats would need a “blue wave” on Election Day to take North Carolina from the grips of Republicans.
Host Matthew Boyle provided some background with the current figures for Democrat in North Carolina, as they are down significantly from where they were in 2020. Republicans, meanwhile, are “up among mail-in ballot requests.”
“In 2024, there’s just 200,000 absentee ballot requests, and they’re 37 percent Democrat and 23 percent Republican. That means the Democrats are down 12 percent from where they were in 2020 and Republicans are up five. That’s a net 17 percent swing,” Boyle noted. For greater perspective, there were over one million mail-in ballot requests in 2020. Of those, 49 percent were Democrat, and 18 percent were Republican.
“If we were all around for 2020, in-person leans Republican. In-person early is a little bit more purple, and that Election Day is just basically a red wave. So they’re down 16 points. It’s going to take a lot for them to basically have any chance at competing at the presidential level,” Daugherty said of Democrats in North Carolina.
“My read on it: I think it’s too late. I think you can’t come back from being down 11 points from this point in 2020, and the other aspect to this is comparing it to the pandemic is actually still kind of a fair comparison. When you’re looking at the proportions, down 11 points and Republicans, more importantly, up five points. What that tells me is all of these Democrats who were basically spoon-fed a mail-in ballot in 2020, they’ve decided just not to request a ballot,” he said, as the decrease in vote-by-mail is ultimately going to hurt Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The amount of banked votes that Kamala Harris is getting right now across the board, but especially in North Carolina, is really, really low compared to 2020, and they needed that, all those banked votes by mail to the tune of hundreds of thousands,” he explained.
“And if volume is down, you know, half a million, that’s a whole lot less opportunity for Democrats to bank in the vote and a whole lot more opportunity for Republicans to easily just vote in person, vote on Election Day like we know they will, and deliver North Carolina for Donald Trump,” he said.