In an earlier post, I said that at this stage of the campaign, each side had to decide whether they want to ‘go wide’ (i.e., attempt to win states that are historically tilted against them and, within each state, seek to broaden their appeal beyond their own base so that the opponent’s lead among their base is reduced)) or ‘go deep’ (focus on just the states that you have a good chance of winning and also try to run up the score with their own base and hope that that will be enough to overcome the opponent’s vote). It is hard to do both due to limited resources. A campaign that feels confident and on offense tends to go wide while one that feels defensive tends to go deep. At least as far as the state of North Carolina is concerned, the Harris-Walz campaign seems to be going wide.

Democrats last won North Carolina in 2008 with Barack Obama and it has been seen as a tough state to win. But Harris-Walz seem to be making a push there, and even going wide within the state. They are not just campaigning in the urban centers but also going into rural areas, hoping to make inroads with voters who tend to vote Republican by having campaign workers make personal appeals to win them over. Most of the time, the workers strike out, but occasionally they get a ‘win’, a voter who seems persuadable or who even says they will vote for Harris.

It’s the occasional wins that are driving the Harris campaign to pour money into an effort to attract voters in rural areas of North Carolina, part of a national strategy to mobilize neglected pockets of Democrats and peel away Republican and independent voters in battleground states. Simply the fact that so many volunteers were willing to work the phones on a Tuesday morning, beyond the cities and the suburbs where Democrats have drawn their greatest strength in the state, inspires a quiet confidence in the Harris camp that the effort might work.

In a race that, according to current state polls, could go either way, the potential payoff for Harris is large. Not only is the effort pushing Donald Trump to spend time and money in a state where he once felt sure of victory; there is also the fact that a Harris win there, capturing sixteen electoral votes, would make it highly probable that she would win the Presidency. As a Harris staff member put it in a training Webinar for about fifty volunteers last month, “There is really no way that Donald Trump can make it to the White House if Democrats win North Carolina.”
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Supporters upbeat about Harris’s chances also point out that Joe Biden lost to Trump by just seventy-four thousand votes out of more than five million cast. “If you’re talking about a half point among white non-college voters, and you pick up a third of a point with Black mobilization, and you slightly overperform with suburban voters, which is very likely, that’s winning and losing in North Carolina,” Michael Halle, a senior organizer in Obama’s campaigns in North Carolina, told me. He admires the Harris campaign’s emphasis on hiring local organizers who know their communities, and he thinks that it’s wise to avoid talking about gender, race, and polarizing cultural themes in favor of discussing values and practical issues that make voters say, “It seems like she’s talking to me about that.”

They are making an effort to reach rural voters who traditionally vote GOP.

Matt Hildreth, the Harris campaign’s new national rural-outreach director, has spent the past dozen years leading Rural Organizing, a progressive nonprofit that develops strategies for communities where Republicans have repeatedly triumphed.
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The Harris campaign now has more than two hundred and thirty paid staff members in North Carolina, including at least a hundred and seventy assigned to twenty-six field offices around the state. One person who has noticed their activities is Thom Tillis, the Republican senator, who told Semafor, “What we’re seeing in North Carolina that we haven’t seen for a time, though, is a really well organized ground game by the Democrats.” Among the rural counties where the campaign has opened offices is Nash, where the popular Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, spent summers working on his family’s tobacco farm and later raised his own family. When organizers launched an office in Wilson County, after Harris entered the race, sixty volunteers showed up.
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Democrats are also counting on down-ballot candidates to lift Harris’s chances. Two years ago, forty-four Republicans ran for the North Carolina legislature in unchallenged races. This year, Democrats are contesting all but three seats. The hope is that these candidates will drive up turnout, to the benefit of Harris, particularly in small towns and rural communities where the Party historically has not fared well.
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Although a pre-debate Quinnipiac poll found Harris leading Trump by three points among likely North Carolina voters, Anderson Clayton, the twenty-six-year-old chair of the state Democratic Party, knows that many national Democrats see North Carolina as the “white whale,” as she put it. “What is Kamala Harris’s biggest fight in the state? It’s getting people to believe that us winning it is possible. That’s what will turn out people to vote. It’s also what will make Republicans not want to turn out to vote. It’s psychological warfare we’re playing here, baby.” Clayton, looking to the margins in rural counties like the one where she grew up, is leaning on the Harris campaign to schedule an appearance by the Vice-President in places like Wilson and Nash counties. “I was, like, give me a day,” she said. “People get excited when they see her. People are ready to run through a brick wall.” 

The wild card in this race, and I mean really, really wild, is the Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson whose scandals seem likely to doom his own chances. The question is whether he will prove to be a sufficient drag on creepy Donald Trump to give the state to Harris, or whether creepy Trump can get voters to overlook his past association with Robinson. The Harris campaign is tying Robinson closely to creepy Trump, with billboards of the two of them together and using the latter’s past gushing praise of him, while the Trump campaign is now acting like they hardly know him.

Seth Meyers describes the delicate dance that the GOP is doing with Robinson.