Trump, Harris in dead heat for NC with a week left to Election Day, WRAL News Poll finds

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in a dead heat in North Carolina with just a week to go until Election Day, according to a new WRAL News Poll released Tuesday. The results come one day before both major-party presidential candidates are scheduled to be in this key battleground state for a final get-out-the-vote push.

Harris, the Democratic nominee, and Trump, the Republican, were tied at 47% among likely voters. Another 2% said they planned to vote for one of the third-party candidates on the ballot this year. The remaining 4% were undecided.

Trump had trailed Harris by 3 percentage points, still a statistical tie, in a WRAL News Poll released in September. The September Poll and the new survey released Tuesday were conducted by SurveyUSA in partnership with WRAL.

The latest results were in line with other recent polls that show a statistical tie between Trump and Harris. An Elon University Poll released Tuesday showed the candidates locked in a 46%-to-46% tie.

“North Carolina remains far too close to call,” Jason Husser, director of the Elon University Poll, said in a statement. “With very strong early-voting turnout for both parties, North Carolina is a state likely to be decided by how the 4% of undecided voters break between the two candidates.”

North Carolina is one of only six or seven states that are considered competitive in this year’s presidential election; Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020, including by just 1.5% of the vote in 2020.

Harris will be in Raleigh on Wednesday and Trump will be in Rocky Mount as the candidates seek to break that apparent tie in pursuit of the state’s 16 electoral votes, which are seen as critical to winning the White House.

While the overall numbers in the WRAL News Poll show a tie, some clear divisions are apparent in a closer examination of the polling results:

• Trump has a 6-point lead among men. Harris has a 7-point lead among women.
• Voters younger than 50 years old prefer Harris. Voters 50 and older prefer Trump.
• Harris leads Trump by double digits among voters who consider themselves moderates.
• Trump has a double-digit lead among people who never went to college. Harris has a double-digit lead among people with a college degree.
• Unaffiliated voters, the state’s largest voting bloc, still have 12% of their ranks undecided on who to vote for — enough to swing the race one way or another.

Chris Cooper, a Western Carolina University political science professor, said the winner is likely going to be whoever can do the best job in these closing days of the election at energizing people who might prefer them, but who are leaning toward not voting at all. In total, the poll found, about 8% of voters who said they prefer Trump are only “probably” going to cast a ballot this year. Among Harris backers, that was slightly higher at 10%.

“What this poll says is the persuasion game is over: Everybody's made up their mind,” Cooper said. “It is about mobilization. One hundred percent, at this point, is about getting your voters out, off the couch and to the ballot box.”

The Raleigh speech for Harris and the Rocky Mount speech for Trump underscore that strategy in action: Harris’s biggest strength is in urban centers while Trump’s biggest strength comes from rural areas.

On either side of the aisle, voters appear on track to match or break the record for turnout set in the 2020 elections, when about 75% of eligible voters cast a ballot.

About 3.2 million voters had cast ballots in the 2024 general election in North Carolina through noon on Tuesday — a turnout of 40.7% of registered voters, according to State Board of Elections data. Through the end of Monday, 2.9 million voters had cast ballots in person — up 11.9% from the same period in 2020, when a significant number of voters cast via mail because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Early voting lasts the rest of this week, ending Saturday afternoon. Election Day is on Tuesday, Nov. 5.

The presidential poll of 853 likely voters reported a credibility interval of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. A credibility interval is similar to a margin of error but takes into account more factors and is considered by some pollsters to be a more accurate measurement of statistical certainty.

Candidates’ base of support

The new poll shows Harris has the edge in North Carolina’s suburbs — a key GOP constituency prior to Trump’s ascendancy in the party — thanks to strong support among women. Suburban men support Trump 48% to 46%, the poll showed, but suburban women support Harris 55% to 38%.

Economically, Trump leads among people who earn between $40,000 and $80,000 a year. Harris leads among people who make less than $40,000. She also leads among people who make more than $80,000.

The poll also showed that Trump’s recent conviction on dozens of felony counts for fraud, in a New York trial earlier this year, didn’t do much to change the minds of his supporters. Neither did the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which led to Trump’s second impeachment.

Of likely 2024 voters who backed Trump in 2020, 4% said either Jan. 6 or the felony convictions made them switch their support to Harris. A slightly larger number said it made them more likely to just not vote at all.

The state of the economy under Democratic President Joe Biden could be a key factor in driving turnout either for or against Harris, his vice president. The poll asked voters if they felt optimistic or pessimistic about their family’s economic outlook, and the results broke down largely along partisan lines. Republican voters were slightly more likely to report feeling pessimistic while Democratic voters were substantially more likely to report feeling optimistic.

Similarly, the question of which candidate would be better at managing the federal government’s response to Helene storm damage almost exactly mirrored the poll’s overall 47%-to-47% tie between Trump and Harris. Forty-six percent of voters said Harris would be better at handling Helene damage, and 47% said Trump.

Cooper said that’s not a surprise.

“Whether it’s disaster relief or the economy — or you can plug in almost any issue imaginable — the whole thing is going to be put through a partisan filter before the voter even responds,” Cooper said. “So I think it's exactly what we're seeing here.”

One potential wrinkle in the presidential race, unrelated to policy, could come from the down-ballot contest for governor between Republican Mark Robinson and Democrat Josh Stein. Some GOP insiders have seen Robinson’s poor polling numbers and growing number of scandals as a possible threat to Trump’s chances of winning the state — by either turning off Republican voters, or firing up Democrats who might not have otherwise voted.

“The majority of Republican voters will still vote for Mark Robinson,” Cooper said. “They're going to vote Republican down the line. But the ones who are more disturbed by his behavior? They may peel off.”

Stein has consistently led in polling, but his lead has widened in recent weeks, ever since CNN published a report alleging that Robinson made a series of lewd and racist comments on a pornographic website more than a decade ago. Robinson has denied the allegations and recently sued CNN for defamation. A Marist Poll last week showed Stein’s lead widening from 11 points in September to 14 points in October.