North Carolina has tens of thousands of moderate Republicans — and some solidly conservative voters — who have the potential to help Democrats flip the state blue in November.
Swaying those voters isn’t a guarantee. But they’re gettable, said Rick Wilson, the former Florida GOP operative who’s now a leading national voice of the “Never Trump” movement.
Other WRAL Top Stories
He hopes he can convince enough of them to prevent Republican former President Donald Trump from getting the state’s 16 electoral votes — part of the group’s broader effort to block Trump’s return to the White House.
In an exclusive interview with WRAL, Wilson confirmed that his group, The Lincoln Project, is readying to reach out to conservative voters across North Carolina in the coming days using highly targeted ads to convince them that Trump is still unfit for the presidency.
That focus on North Carolina wasn’t decided until very recently. When President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, Wilson said, the polling made North Carolina look no longer competitive. Trump had too big of a lead. But the polls have changed substantially in the weeks since Biden dropped out, replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We have expanded our swing state map as the numbers in the post-Biden moment have shifted rather radically,” Wilson said.
It’s the latest move indicating that moderates and some disaffected Republicans think Harris can win in North Carolina. Last week, the Harris campaign launched its North Carolina chapter of the group “Republicans for Harris” with support from several former GOP politicians and party activists.
The campaigns are now heating up, as Trump has picked U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate and Harris has picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as hers. Democrats had long been running ads in North Carolina, trying to make up ground in the polls, but last week the Trump campaign bought its first ads in North Carolina — indicating his campaign also believes the state is back in play.
The polling firm Redfield & Wilton Strategies found Trump leading Biden by 6 points in North Carolina in mid-July. More recently, it found the Democrats’ switch to Harris had cut Trump’s lead in half, down to 3 points. And a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found that Trump had only a 1-point lead over Harris in North Carolina, indicating essentially a tied race.
Republican leaders in North Carolina say they’re not concerned about the efforts, by groups like The Lincoln Project and Republicans for Harris, to chip away at Trump’s support within the party and stop him from winning the state for a third straight time. U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, a member of the hardline Freedom Caucus and this year’s GOP nominee for state attorney general, said he doesn’t worry about the battle for moderates. Harris, he said, is more far-left than Trump is far-right.
“I don't honestly believe you can make the case that either Donald Trump or JD Vance are anything out on the wing of the Republican Party in the way that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are on the Democratic Party,” Bishop said. “They are way outside the mainstream.”
But the numbers indicate at least the potential for worry among Republicans.
Thin margins, closer polls
Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes out of 5.5 million ballots cast. And in this year’s primary election more than 280,000 North Carolinians voted against Trump in the Republican Party primary. Most backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Some of those were likely voters who will back Trump anyway in November, or who were always planning to vote Democratic this November despite voting in that primary. But voter turnout in November is expected to be double or triple what it was in the primary, and Wilson said he thinks there will be enough voters who usually lean to the right but can be convinced to vote against Trump.
“We don't have to go into Wisconsin or North Carolina or Georgia and move a million voters,” Wilson said. “We have to move a few hundred thousand voters here or there.”
Recent polls show Harris trailing Trump by between 1 and 3 percentage points in North Carolina — a closer margin than when Biden was still on the ticket.
Wilson said his group plans to target veterans and others who he calls “national security Republicans” — the foreign policy hawks of the Reagan and Bush eras — with messaging about Trump’s well-documented fondness for dictators including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as Trump’s more isolationist foreign policy views in general.
North Carolina has an above-average population of veterans; Fayetteville and Jacksonville are home to two of the world’s largest military bases in Fort Liberty and Camp Lejeune. Wilson said that in addition to those voters, he expects the battle over swing voters to be waged in the suburbs of Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro.
His group will heavily focus on flipping conservative-leaning women in those suburbs, particularly those with teenage children, by hammering Trump and Vance on abortion.
Bishop said he doesn’t think such efforts will work, noting that Trump has recently rejected calls by social conservatives to ban abortions nationwide if elected. “Consider President Trump's view that, on the question of life, that the issue belongs with the states,” Bishop said. “He's not pursuing national policy on that.”
As recently as March, Trump suggested that he’d support a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks. But he has since changed his messaging, now suggesting he’d leave the issue up to the states.
A new campaign vibe
Wilson is known for his aggressive, irreverent social media presence. He said he’s been pleased to see a more aggressive shift in Democrats’ own messaging, after Harris took over the presidential campaign for Biden.
Trump — a New Yorker with a background in reality TV and a fondness for professional wrestling — has been a natural on the campaign trail at lobbing insults at the competition. Wilson said he thinks it’s about time Democrats started playing by the same rules.
“If you're going to go into a knife fight, bring a gun,” he said.
It seems to have begun. Harris and her campaign have now started lobbing insults back, calling Republicans “weird” — especially Vance. When Harris introduced her vice presidential pick Tuesday, Walz made a play on words referencing crude social media memes involving Vance and a couch.
“You see what I did there?” Walz then asked the cheering audience as Harris, standing behind him, appeared to conceal her laughter.
Wilson said some voters do still long for a more stately style of politics that values respect for the other side. But most Americans are long past that, he added, and it’s smart for Harris to catch up to where voters are.
“It makes the campaign more organic, and more fun, and more engaging,” he said of the noticeable shift in tone from Biden to Harris. “I can tell you, a lot of voters in this country have given up on the old way of politics. … It's incredibly wise to go at it in a way that isn't the fake posture of propriety that existed in the past.”
While Democrats have delighted in hammering Vance and pointing out how he once compared Trump to Hitler, North Carolina Republican Party chairman Jason Simmons said he thinks Harris flubbed with her own pick of Walz, who was considered the most progressive of the politicians rumored to be finalists for her vice president.
As Minnesota’s governor, Walz signed laws including free school lunches for all children, a “red flag” law to take guns away from people deemed a threat to themselves or others, and a new 0.7% tax on businesses to fund paid family and medical leave for workers statewide.
That could help the GOP, Simmons said, in a state no Democratic candidate has won since 2008.
“What we see with this pick is, again, the doubling down of the far progressive agenda,” Simmons said. “North Carolina voters, time and time again, have shown no indication that they would embrace that far-left agenda.”
After Harris picked Walz, local political scientist Michael Bitzer of Catawba College told WRAL it appeared to be a play at reaching younger voters, who lean more progressive but also less likely to vote. “They have consistently had sub-par turnout rates,” he said.
In 2020, turnout for North Carolina voters aged 40 and under was about 62% — more than 10 percentage points lower than the statewide turnout of 75%, Bitzer said. “Pushing those rates up in a closely-divided state would likely be a significant task, but have huge potential rewards,” he said.