Democratic delegates from North Carolina unanimously endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s presidential nominee Sunday after a whirlwind of political maneuvering in the hours after President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection campaign.
Biden said Sunday afternoon on social media that he won’t seek reelection and endorsed Harris to take his place atop the ticket. The move came weeks after an uneven debate performance that caused many Democrats to question the viability of his campaign.
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Biden's decision gives Democrats a chance to repair its image with voters in key battleground states — including North Carolina, where he lost to the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, by less than 75,000 votes.
Biden doesn’t get to automatically pick his successor.
A presidential nominee isn’t decided until Democratic delegates from across the nation vote for a candidate at the party’s convention next month. The process is usually easy: delegates typically vote for the candidate who won the primary in their state. With Biden out of the race, the party’s delegates are slated to attend the convention while unassigned.
North Carolina’s delegates expressed their endorsement as delegates from other states — including Colorado, Alabama and Tennessee — started to do the same, and as other North Carolina political leaders started to close ranks behind Harris.
"This November, it’ll be a prosecutor going up against a felon," North Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton said in a statement late Sunday, referencing Harris' background as San Francisco's district attorney and California's attorney general. "It will be experience going up against extremism."
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, rumored to be on a short list of possible Harris running mates if she wins the nomination, endorsed Harris ahead of the party’s announcement.
"She has what it takes to defeat Donald Trump and lead our country thoughtfully and with integrity,” Cooper said Sunday on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I look forward to campaigning for her as we work to win NC up and down the ticket.”
Cooper later spoke with Harris by phone to express his support.
Added U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, a Raleigh Democrat: “The path forward is clear — we must unite behind Vice President Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump. Together, we can win in November and build on the historic progress forged by President Biden.”
While support for Harris was growing Sunday, she will still need the support of the majority of the party’s hundreds of delegates across the nation.
Biden’s endorsement of Harris will carry weight with delegates who were pledged to him, but it’s not a slam dunk — they can choose to support someone else.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, in a statement, promised “a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
The Democrats haven’t gone into a convention without a clear nominee since 1968, the infamous Chicago convention that ended in violence in the streets over candidates’ positions on the Vietnam War and civil rights.
Biden’s endorsement was already paying dividends late Sunday.
The Durham County Democratic Party announced its endorsement of Harris hours before the state’s delegates declared their support for the vice president. Biden’s backing underpinned the decision, said Emerson Kirby, a vice chairwoman for the county party.
“She's ready to run this nation and I think that the continued support that we're seeing so quickly only speaks to that,” Kirby said.
While more Democrats began to back Harris during the hours following Biden’s announcement, some Democrats who are calling for unity behind a new nominee didn’t take a position immediately.
Former President Barack Obama stopped short of endorsing Harris in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s announcement. “I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,” Obama said in a statement.
Polls and GOP response
Whether it’s Harris or someone else, North Carolina voters have been clamoring for other options. A WRAL News Poll in March poll found that 55% of likely voters in North Carolina wish they had different options for president.
And a plurality of likely voters held “very unfavorable” opinions about the 81-year-old Biden and the 78-year-old Trump, who ran against each other in 2020.
“The polls have been showing for a long time that ordinary Democratic voters are concerned that Joe Biden is too old, and that became a concern that was impossible to ignore after the debate,” said Steven Greene, a political science professor at N.C. State University.
David McLennan, a political scientist at Meredith College, added: “Almost anyone on the ballot — Kamala Harris or someone else — should create some enthusiasm. How long that enthusiasm will last — will it last until Election Day? — we’ll have to wait and see about that.”
If Harris earns the nomination, she might have a higher hurdle to clear than Biden did in North Carolina, which Trump carried in his previous White House runs in 2016 and 2020.
A Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll conducted July 1-4 found Harris with lower favorability ratings than Biden. Forty-two percent of respondents said they had a favorable impression of Biden, while Harris had 40%. At the same time, Harris isn’t disliked as much as Biden. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they viewed Biden unfavorably, while the number was 55% for Harris.
Other polls conducted prior to Biden’s decision showed Trump leading other candidates in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Of those four states, a poll by The Telegraph found that Trump’s lead was smallest in North Carolina: 44% of voters favored Trump, while 42% favored Biden. The rest said they’d vote for someone else or were still undecided.
That calculus likely changed after the assassination attempt on Trump, which has energized his base. Some polls, including one North Carolina poll by The Telegraph, showed Trump’s lead widening in North Carolina following the shooting at the July 13 rally.
National polls indicate a closer race in a head-to-head battle between Harris and Trump. In a July 15-16 Reuters/Ipsos poll, Harris and Trump were in a dead heat at 44%. The same poll showed Biden trailing Trump by two percentage points.
Political analysts say it’s difficult to predict how voters will respond to a new-look Democratic ticket, given how little polling is conducted on hypotheticals.
Harris could gain an edge in North Carolina with her choice of a running mate. Media reports have indicated that Harris is considering Gov. Cooper and a short list of other Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Greene, the N.C. State political scientist, said Harris would be wise to pick a Southern white male to balance out the ticket.
“Kamala Harris's job is to assure Middle America — especially more white America, more rural America where she doesn't have to win, she just has to not lose too badly — that she's not some crazy liberal, that she's somebody who is more moderate,” Greene told WRAL. “How do you assure people like that? By nominating someone like Roy Cooper … or Andy Beshear from Kentucky.”
North Carolina was the only swing state Biden lost in 2020, as he carried Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But if Democrats lose other swing states this year, then flipping North Carolina would keep his path to reelection alive.
Not only could Cooper boost enthusiasm among Democrats in North Carolina, he may also help the ticket appeal to more conservative voters. In North Carolina, Cooper’s approval rating among Republicans is much stronger than Biden’s, said McLennan, the Meredith Poll director.
He said Cooper’s average approval rating among Republicans is 36% over six years, while Biden’s approval among Republicans is 8% over three years.
North Carolina Republicans on Sunday sought to capitalize on Biden’s decision, saying he’s no longer fit to run the country.
“Today’s announcement is an acknowledgment of what the American people already knew: Joe Biden is not capable of being President,” North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Jason Simmons said in a statement.
“It also exposes the craven political expediency of the Democrat Party. They have no message, nothing to offer voters, and have benched Joe Biden solely to keep political power. As we saw at the [Republican National Convention last week], President Trump and Senator JD Vance lead a united Republican Party that will deliver for the American people once elected on Nov. 5."
‘Black mobilization’
Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer said he believes the Democrats will nominate Harris, especially after Biden’s endorsement. Black women voters are the most reliable base the party has.
Choosing a different candidate, Bitzer said, “would probably make the 1968 Democratic National Convention look like a true party unity festival.”
“If you bypass the first African-American woman to potentially head a ticket, you are going to have to deal with a core base of the Democratic Party and the potential retribution that that could bring as well,” Bitzer said.
The Democratic Party’s main problem in North Carolina is not necessarily with who is on the ticket, other political scientists say. Rather, it’s the party’s ability to energize Black voters — a key constituency for Democrats anywhere, but particularly in North Carolina where about one-quarter of the population is Black or multiracial.
While Black voters turned out in large numbers to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, Democrats have struggled to copy that performance in North Carolina ever since. Simply nominating Harris, who is Black and of Asian descent, may not entirely fix that problem.
Even when Democrats nominated Cheri Beasley for the U.S. Senate in 2022 — in a race that would’ve made her one of few Black women ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, and the first from North Carolina — voter turnout rates were below average in many of the state’s centers of Black political power. Beasley lost.
“If you have a person of color at the top of the ticket, that does not automatically translate to higher Black mobilization, higher Black turnout,” Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper told WRAL this month. “There has to be more than that.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is running to become the state's first Black governor.
Harris has visited North Carolina 15 times since taking office. One speech earlier this month was held at a formerly segregated high school in Greensboro, the city famous for Civil Rights era actions including a 1960 sit-in at Woolworth’s department store that launched similar tactics nationwide. It was one of several stops in a string of events aimed at illustrating her racial identity and personal background.
She kicked off her speech talking about the Civil Rights movement and her own parents’ activism, then all-but commanded the crowd to keep that history in mind and go vote: “We have a duty to serve in the fight for freedom, opportunity and justice for all,” she said. “And it is that sense of duty. Not ‘If you feel like it.’ Duty.”
Irving Joyner, a law professor at North Carolina Central University, thinks Harris will invigorate voters in a way that Biden couldn’t.
“It's going to brighten up the race, it's going to bring new energy into it,” he said. “And the fact she's a woman on the African-American side is going to energize African-American women and men, as well as the Asian community who will be energized to deal with this campaign.”
WRAL News reporters Will Doran and Aaron Thomas contributed to this report.