Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is waving the white flag in North Carolina, surrendering the state to former President Donald Trump as her campaign withdraws nearly $2 million in planned ad buys from television stations statewide one week before the election.
The more than $1.7 million in canceled ad buys by Harris’s campaign in North Carolina suggests that her team believes, given polling data and early vote data, that the Tar Heel State is no longer in play for her.
Trump’s senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita jumped at the news on Tuesday morning, celebrating Harris’s team giving up on the state one week before the election:
More than 3 million people have already voted in early voting in North Carolina, which can be done via mail-in absentee ballot or via in-person locations around the state. Republicans, interestingly, for the first time ever actually lead the early vote–North Carolina provides the partisan breakdown and demographic data on early voters in the state–something they have done now for more than a week. This remarkably consistent GOP lead has shocked political observers, and comes as demographic data also suggests Democrats face serious issues in competing at the top of the ticket in the state. Black voter turnout is down approximately 3 percent from 2020, and about 1 percent more men than women, as compared with 2020, are voting in the state. These strong headwinds against Harris in North Carolina were proving to be a major issue for her in the closing days of the campaign as she set to flip the only battleground state out of seven nationwide that Trump won in 2020. For comparison purposes, again Trump won North Carolina in 2020–and the electorate per the early voting data based on millions of votes cast so far suggests a much more GOP-friendly electorate even than then.
In addition, older voters are turning out in much higher numbers while younger voters are dropping off from last time:
So all of this makes sense as to why Harris would withdraw from the state in any serious way. Democrats also face similar issues in Arizona and Nevada, where Republicans also lead in both states. Georgia, meanwhile, does not provide partisan breakdown of voters since there is no partisan registration in the state but out of the millions who voted early there the demographic breakdown suggests major issues for Democrats in the Peach State. Cumulatively, the big picture of the data set publicly available seems to suggest that Democrats are losing the so-called “Sun Belt” states of North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia in a big way–forcing the race back up north to the upper “Rust Belt” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Harris faces major problems in each of those places as well, and Trump seems to be making inroads beyond the traditional battlegrounds too as he seeks to compete in bluer states like Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico.