Presidential candidates descend on NC, with election far in the distance

The 2024 presidential election is more than a year and a half away. But voters could be forgiven for thinking it’s just around the corner, given the flurry of high-profile visits to North Carolina this week.

Four of the top 2024 contenders for the White House are planning to visit the Tar Heel State on Friday and Saturday — an early indication of how important North Carolina is to each party.

Democratic President Joe Biden is scheduled to be in Rocky Mount and Fayetteville on Friday. That same day, in Greensboro, the annual North Carolina Republican Party convention will feature a speech from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. On Saturday, former Vice President Mike Pence will address the convention followed by another speech several hours later by former President Donald Trump.

It’s the first time this election cycle the three Republicans will be at the same event as candidates, according to organizers — an early chance for conservative voters to watch them back to back and size up who they want to take on Biden next year

Once party primaries are decided early next year, the two nominees will likely turn their attention to the half-dozen or so battleground states that have the power to decide presidential elections: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and possibly a few others.

North Carolina, the nation’s ninth-biggest state, has 16 votes in the electoral college. And it’s a tricky state to figure out for candidates. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans. Trump won the state in 2020 — each time with less than 50% of the vote due to third-party candidates — while at the same time voters picked a Democrat to be governor. The state also elected Republicans in the majority of other statewide elections.

In 2024, Democrats and Republicans will also have to contend with political shifts in the state’s growing population — and the fact that the state’s largest bloc of voters isn’t affiliated with either political party.

What does that mean for candidates? “They’re going to have to confront the fact that the demographics are changing in North Carolina, partisan un-affiliation is changing in North Carolina, and these may be things that you can’t control,” said Davidson College political science professor Susan Roberts.

The candidates will do what they can — pumping a lot of money into North Carolina for ads and get-out-the-vote efforts from now until November 2024. And they’ll probably be visiting a lot more, pushing their agendas in person.

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Biden’s visit Friday will focus in part on workforce training and efforts to strengthen the economy. Republicans will hammer Biden on the economy in 2024, North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley said.

Data show the economy is booming. Wages are up, and so is job creation; May’s job numbers exceeded what experts expected to see, according to national media reports, with the U.S. adding 339,000 new jobs last month alone.

However, wages haven’t always kept up with inflation, which is also growing. And polls show many Americans fear the nation is in, or on the brink of, a recession. Last month, an Associated Press poll found just 24% of Americans are confident about the economy and 33% approve of Biden's job performance related to the economy.

“This needs to be an election that is going to be a referendum on his agenda, and on what has happened to the economy,” Whatley told WRAL in a recent interview. “... I welcome a conversation on Joe Biden's performance and track record.”

Roberts said the state isn’t a must-win for either party. But it could be an insurance policy: Even if Republicans flip the three states that Biden won by the smallest margins in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — then Biden could still win reelection by flipping just one state of his own: North Carolina, The Washington Post reported.

Trump and Biden are considered the favorites to win their parties’ nominations for the 2024 presidential race. Biden faces little opposition from within his party; typical for an incumbent president.

On the GOP side, DeSantis and Pence are just two of several candidates with national followings seeking to defeat Trump in the Republican primary. Adding to the drama of having all three address this weekend’s GOP convention is that Trump himself is responsible for giving both his challengers much of their political stardom. He elevated Pence to national relevance by making him his vice president in 2016, and he helped DeSantis become Florida’s governor in the 2018 elections with a key endorsement.

If the election is a rematch of Trump and Biden, Roberts said, some voters might feel less than enthusiastic about coming out to the polls. Biden is 80, Trump is 76, and neither has sky-high approval ratings.

If that’s the case, she said, then the governor’s race could be what really energizes voters, as both parties seek to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

“If what’s going on in the state legislature is a reflection of the support for DeSantis, DeSantis should do well,” Roberts said.

Whoever wins will likely end up spending big in North Carolina and other closely contested states.

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The new abortion law may help Democrats raise money and energize their base, but it might not flip many Republican voters to the other side, Roberts said. Top GOP lawmakers have been open about relying heavily on public polling to decide what they did and didn’t include in the abortion law.

“If the Republicans in the state House and state Senate were afraid of the backlash to their vote on abortion, they wouldn’t have passed what they passed,” Roberts said.

A large part of the reason Democrats were more or less powerless to stop the new GOP-backed abortion bill was because Republicans now have a legislative supermajority for the first time in five years, following victories in last year’s midterm election and a recent party switch so dramatic it made national news.

The performance in the midterm elections prompted internal strife and a shakeup in the state’s Democratic Party leadership. Anderson Clayton — a 25-year-old organizer from Person County — capitalized on the mood and seized control from incumbent party chair Bobbie Richardson, a 73-year-old former legislator who was backed by the party establishment.

Clayton faced a major loss soon after taking over, when Charlotte-area Rep. Tricia Cotham left the Democratic Party, handing Republicans the final vote they needed to override Cooper’s vetoes on party-line votes. It left Democrats one tool they can use in next year’s elections: anger.

“Every time that Republicans overreach, and that’s what they’re doing right now on so many levels, it invigorates and energizes Democrats to fight back,” said Morgan Jackson, a strategist for Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, who’s running for governor.

As NC abortion bill advances, eyes shift to 2024 governor's race

Legislative Democrats said much the same this week, after Republican state senators rolled out a bill that could change many of the rules around how voting works in 2024 — changes supporters say are needed for election integrity but which opponents say are secretly intended to force elections officials to throw legitimate ballots in the trash, and which will target types of voting more often used by Democrats.

“I’m hoping that people will wake up and just say, ‘We’ve had enough,’” said Rep. Robert Reives, the top House Democrat, in a press conference this week.

Republicans aren’t concerned. As much as the legislature’s actions this year have been mobilizing Democrats, the GOP has seen a similar bump to its volunteer recruitment and grassroots efforts, said Whatley, the state GOP chairman.

Voters put Republicans in power and are glad to see them use that power, Whatley told WRAL. “They understood the issues that the voters are dealing with and put solutions on the table,” he said. “The fact that, in early June, we are getting this type of enthusiasm across the state is absolutely fantastic.”

But while Republicans enjoy a supermajority in the legislature, presidential elections are another question entirely. Trump won North Carolina in 2016 and 2020, but both times most North Carolinians voted against him. Due to the presence of third-party candidates on the ballot, Trump won North Carolina with less than 50% of the vote both times.

Barack Obama’s 2008 win was the only time a Democrat has won North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976. And Obama’s win was by the thinnest of margins — just 14,000 votes out of more than 4.2 million ballots cast. While the state has voted Republican in every presidential election since then, Democrats improved in 2020 and are hoping to carry that momentum into 2024.

Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in North Carolina by about 3.5 points, but Biden closed the gap in 2020 to 1.5 points, getting 48.6% of the vote in North Carolina to Trump’s 49.9%.

Whatley, however, said he believes North Carolina will oppose Biden a second time, no matter who his party’s nominee is.

“As we go into the ’24 election cycle, there are just not many issues that the Democrats can run on right now,” he said. “Here in North Carolina, the Republican policies that have been passed by the legislature are overwhelmingly supported by the overall voting base, and not just Republicans.”