North Carolina now part of 'Magnificent Seven' swing states in the presidential race

In the race for president, North Carolina is a state that is nice but not essential for the Democrat to win. However, it is a state Republicans cannot lose.

The Electoral College math becomes very tricky for a Republican candidate who cannot hold onto our light-pink to purple state and its now 16 electoral votes — we gained an elector with the last Census due to a population bump. Conversely, a Democrat typically has other routes available to the magic number of 270 electoral votes, even a path that can bypass the South altogether.

More: Gary Pearce: Vice President Kamala Harris smoothly took over Joe Biden’s ship with ‘joy and hope’

The campaigns of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Donald Trump, her GOP counterpart, accept this reality in North Carolina and are investing heavily here.

Analyst moves North Carolina to jump ball status in 2024 presidential race

The latest polling shows that they should. Sabato's Crystal Ball, a respected elections analyst, shifted North Carolina into the “toss-up” category for the presidential race from “leans Republican,” where it had sat for a long time — when Biden, who dropped out of the race on July 21, was the nominee.

More: Pitts: North Carolina runs very secure elections

North Carolina is one of the “Magnificent Seven" swing states that will decide this election, the Crystal Ball states. The others are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“The Old North State” ties with Georgia as the second biggest haul among those swing states when it comes to the number of electoral votes. First is Pennsylvania, with 19 votes; the commonwealth is as critical to Harris as North Carolina is to Trump.

More: Pitts: Kamala Harris rallied in Fayetteville. I was there. Days later, the election changed

NC Gov. Cooper slotted for prominent role at Democratic National Convention

North Carolina’s special status is one reason Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper nearly made it to the shortlist for Harris’s vice presidential pick, a job for which he took himself out of the running. The governor is still slated to speak in a prominent slot on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when Harris is scheduled to deliver a speech formally accepting her party’s nomination.

In 2020, North Carolina was the only swing state that Trump won over Joe Biden en route to an Electoral College loss that made Biden the 46th president. The margin in the state was as close as a Carolina-Duke basketball game: 1.3% separated the candidates.

The race looks like it will be tight again. Trump has a +1.2 average lead over Harris in a head-to-head matchup, according to Rear Clear Politics, a political poll aggregator and news website. Harris leads Trump by 2 when third-party candidates Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West are included, according to a poll by the New York Times and Siena College.

Incoming: Millions for political ads and ground game across North Carolina

What this translates to in the real world is multiple millions spent by both campaigns, with multiple in-person visits to match by Harris and Trump and their campaign surrogates. The Harris campaign has opened 20 field offices, including in Fayetteville. It is unclear if Trump's campaign has matched that investment, but the campaign opened a regional headquarters in Rocky Mount in June.

Harris dropped by Raleigh last Friday for her eighth visit this year to North Carolina, where she laid out her economic agenda. Trump was in Asheboro on Wednesday, where he talked about national security.

The big picture: North Carolina, Georgia represent battle for the South

The bigger picture is that North Carolina and Georgia, which Biden won in 2020, illustrate Democrats’ attempt to reach into the traditional South, which for decades has been solid Republican at the presidential level (Obama managed to win North Carolina by a slim margin in 2008.)

At the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Anderson Clayton, the Democrats' state party chair, led the roll call for North Carolina and declared: “We represent a new South!"

November will tell the story of how much, or if, things have changed politically in the Old North State.

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at [email protected] or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: NC should expect millions in election spending from Harris and Trump