The campaign to reelect President Joe Biden is planning on spending millions in North Carolina, hopeful they can flip the state blue as the Obama-Biden ticket once did.
Biden’s campaign has 16 offices and hired more than 60 staff members in the state so far, which is more than he invested in the state in 2020 and Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The Biden campaign has spent $5.2 million in the Tar Heel state as of June 19, an investment that could force former President Donald Trump’s campaign to spend money in the Republican-leaning state. So far, Trump’s campaign has not spent anything in North Carolina.
“This is a bigger, bolder effort,” Geoff Garin, a Biden pollster, told the Wall Street Journal. “And there’s nothing like it on the Trump side.”
Biden lost the state to Trump in 2020 by just more than 1 percentage point. Before former President Barack Obama captured the state in 2008, the last time North Carolina chose a Democrat for the presidency was in 1976 for Jimmy Carter.
The president is expected to visit North Carolina next week, his fourth visit to the state this year. His right-hand woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, has visited the state five times.
Despite a Republican hold on the state, Democrats have still shown they can win statewide elections. Seven in eight of the recent gubernatorial elections were won by Democrats. The elections for the U.S. Senate were close in both 2020 and 2022, with Republicans winning seats by less than 4 points each year.
In this year’s governor’s race, North Carolina’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC). Robinson was a Trump-endorsed candidate who concerns some mainstream Republicans over his previous comments, where he denied the Holocaust and said the victims of the 2018 Parkland school shooting were “spoiled, angry, know-it-all children.”
The Biden campaign looks hopeful that some of Robinson’s extremist views could turn people away from him and provide up and down the ballot support for Democrats.
“I think that Biden and Stein are going to lift each other up in this race in different ways and with different groups of voters,” Garin said.
Biden’s loss there in 2020, which was by about 74,000 votes, was the closest a Democrat has come to winning the presidency there since Obama in 2008.
North Carolina’s growing population also looks favorable for Biden as more than 100,000 new people have moved to the state since 2020. Charlotte and Raleigh are among the top 10 metro areas for growth nationally, and many residents have come from blue-leaning states such as New York and California.
Part of the issue for Biden’s campaign, however, may be increasing voter morale and making sure people actually turn out here. In North Carolina presidential elections, black voters turned out in 2008 with 73% of the demographic voting, but turnout fell to 68% in 2020 and hit a low of 63% in 2016.
“If those folks decide to show up at their political strength, we could see the tipping of North Carolina,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College.
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Voter turnout in Mecklenburg, which includes Charlotte and is the state’s second largest, was below the state’s average in 2020. Democrats are looking to turn that around.
“We are in the state that was the closest state that Donald Trump won, and we’ve got this gold mine in Mecklenburg,” said Drew Kromer, chairman of the Mecklenburg Democratic Party.
