MSNBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki on Wednesday analyzed the tight race in North Carolina between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to Kornacki's data, Trump won North Carolina by 49.9% to 48.6% against President Joe Biden and 49.8% to 46.2% against former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Kornacki told MSNBC's “The Chris Jansing Report” that Democrats don't need to make major changes before the 2024 election to have a chance of winning the state.
“North Carolina was a close race…. If you look back at 2016, Donald Trump won the state, but by about 3.5 points. Democrats erased more than half of Trump's 2016 vote margin in 2020, and the margin between Trump and Biden narrowed to about 75,000 votes in 2020. That means a lot doesn't need to change here for Democrats to actually flip the state,” Kornacki said.
MSNBC's Steve Kornacki breaks down the close race in North Carolina, which Trump won twice. pic.twitter.com/Cn5NgpTDWH
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Kornacki said Democrats are “seeing hope” as cities and densely populated suburbs are trending more Democratic while rural areas are trending more Republican. He pointed to Wake County, where Biden won 62.3% to 35.8% in 2020, and where Clinton and former President Barack Obama won in large lands. (RELATED: MSNBC's Steve Kornacki breaks down 'big shift' in Democratic support since Biden dropped out of the election)
“What Democrats are looking at is these are population centers and, importantly, they're growing. They're more populous and they're becoming more Democratic,” Kornacki continued.
Kornacki then explained that the state's rural, Republican-leaning counties have led to Republican victories in past elections, citing tiny Surry County, which Trump won in a landslide victory, 75.2% to 23.8% in 2020. Republicans in the county grew from a 28-point lead in 2008 to a 52-point lead that year.
The MSNBC correspondent noted that many counties with majority African-American populations voted for Biden in 2020, but Obama's wins in those counties fell short.
“That may be a key variable when we talk about these two forces driving North Carolina politics: Can Kamala Harris and the Democrats get closer to Obama's level in these counties than, say, Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016? Even a small margin like that could make a big difference,” Kornacki said.
In North Carolina, Trump was narrowly leading Harris, 45.8% to 45.5% as of Wednesday. According to To FiveThirtyEight.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stopped campaigning on Friday to endorse Trump in an effort to be removed from the ballot in battleground states. North Carolina's first absentee ballots are scheduled to be sent out on September 6, so it may be too late to remove Kennedy from the North Carolina ballot. According to To CBS News.
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