Ever since Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008, the Tar Heel State has been something of a white whale for the Democratic Party, a place that’s teased them a few times at the presidential level but where they keep falling short. Along with Indiana, it was one of two states that Obama lost in 2012 despite carrying four years prior, and Donald Trump actually beat Mitt Romney’s margin in the state in 2016. Despite most polling indicating that Joe Biden had a slight lead in the state going into election night 2020, Trump ultimately prevailed, albeit by just over one percent of the vote. 

But despite all of these near misses and close calls, Democrats are once again determined to flip North Carolina, perhaps their only chance to add to Biden’s winning map from 2020. At first blush, a winning Kamala Harris strategy in North Carolina shouldn’t be too different from Biden’s winning strategy in Georgia in 2020: wrack up overwhelming margins in urban/suburban areas like the Charlotte metro and the Research Triangle, particularly from Black and white college-educated voters, to overwhelm the state’s historic Republican lean. 

There are a few wrinkles to this plan though – the first is that North Carolina’s Black population is nearly ten points smaller than Georgia’s Black population, providing Democrats with less of a firewall against overwhelmingly Republican white rural voters. However, North Carolina also happens to be the fourth most Latino swing state after Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, and while Latinos as a whole are expected to shift right, polling indicates that Harris could come close to matching Biden’s number with the demographic in North Carolina specifically, adding another crucial block to her coalition. The same can’t be said for North Carolina’s large Native American population, though: although the state’s Cherokee voters are reliably Democratic, North Carolina’s other large tribe, the Lumbee, have shifted their support to Republicans in the Trump era by large margins.

Further complicating the Georgia-to-North Carolina comparison is that the combined population of the Charlotte metro area and the Research Triangle is much smaller than that of Metro Atlanta. In Georgia, Democrats were able to focus most of their efforts on a geographically concentrated group of counties that’s home to roughly 55% of Georgia’s population; meanwhile, only about 48% of North Carolinians live in the Charlotte area or the Triangle. And many of those who don’t live in these blueing metros are moving in the opposite direction at a comparable rate, with Republican gains in Obama-Trump counties like Bladen and Granville combatting those made by Democrats in more suburban counties like New Hanover and Nash. 

So what do Democrats have going for them in North Carolina? For one thing, Donald Trump will have to try to distance himself from Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s controversial lieutenant governor and the Republican nominee for governor. Pick a demographic group, and Robinson has probably insulted them – he’s described abortion as “child sacrifice” (despite the fact that he helped pay for an abortion in the 1980s), claimed that Black Panther was created by “an agnostic Jew” and “satanic Marxists” to make money off of Black audiences, questioned key facts about the Holocaust, called homosexuality “filth,” said that feminism is “watered by the devil,” labeled survivors of the Parkland shooting “media prosti-tots,” and declared in a June speech that “some folks need killing.” Thus far, Robinson has not displayed the same Teflon-esque qualities of Trump, and these controversial comments seem to be sticking, as he’s trailed Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein in nearly every recent gubernatorial poll. Whether or not “reverse coattails,” wherein a down ballot candidate can either boost or drag down a member of the same party at the top of the ticket, actually exist is a matter of debate, but Democrats should be able to turn out their base to vote against Robinson and, in the process, have them cast votes for Harris as well. In other words, Robinson’s candidacy may act as its own mini Dobbs effect, mobilizing his opponents in much larger numbers than his supporters – after all, Democrats consider him such a danger that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper may have turned down the vice presidential nomination just so Robinson wouldn’t assume temporary powers while Cooper campaigned in other states.

It also helps Democrats that Robinson is more or less the rule, rather than the exception, when it comes to the North Carolina Republican Party. Republican superintendent of public instruction candidate Michele Morrow has called for Obama to be executed via firing squad on pay-per-view television, while the state party itself voted to censure former Senator Richard Burr after he voted to convict Trump during the former president’s second impeachment and took the same measure against current Senator Thom Tillis for his bipartisan approach to issues like LGBTQ rights and immigration. Considering that the party currently enjoys a supermajority in the state legislature and has been fairly successful in most recent non-gubernatorial, non-attorney general elections, there doesn’t seem to be quite the same level of MAGA vs. establishment schism in North Carolina as there is in Michigan and Arizona, but any level of dysfunction at the state party level is likely to negatively impact a race (just ask New York Democrats or…Michigan and Arizona Republicans). 

On the whole, North Carolina in 2024 looks a lot like North Carolina in 2020 – a close state with characteristics favoring Republicans, but trends that favor Democrats. The question this year will be whether or not the speed of those trends finally match their trajectory, pushing Harris over the hump and ensuring that the state sports the same color on election night that UNC does on the basketball court. If she can pull it off, it’ll likely be as an accessory to larger wins across other, more important swing states. But it would also signal that Democrats are finally breaking through and finding ways to win in the once solidly Republican Southeast outside of Georgia.