In Narrowly Divided North Carolina, a Light Blue County Is Key for Harris
Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.
Ms. Harris will visit Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.
“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”
The voter coalition that powered Mr. Obama’s 2008 victory included an explosion of Black turnout in the urban Democratic strongholds around Charlotte and the Research Triangle that includes Raleigh and Durham, while counting on critical masses of the Democrats spread out in rural regions alongside white college-educated voters and young people. Canvassers in Mecklenburg have focused largely on turning out Black and Latino voters as well as the handful of independent and infrequent voters in the area.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/us/politics/harris-democrats-north-carolina.html