As Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at the PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, North Carolina, women in line lamented that they had missed her speech starting. Just hours ago, just a few miles away, supporters began leaving the Gastonia Municipal Airport minutes after former president Donald Trump began to speak.
Harris elected to make one final stop in North Carolina as her opponent, former president Donald Trump, decided to do four stops in the state for the final weekend of campaigning.
Women filed into the pavilion with “Childless Cat Lady” shirts, a dig at Trump’s Senator JD Vance famously deriding women without children, and some Puerto Ricans wore shirts expressing pride in their heritage after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
But Harris knew that North Carolina was still an uphill climb for her, first asking who in the audience had already voted and then petitioning them to get their friends to vote.
“For anyone who hasn’t voted yet, first of all, no judgment, but please do get to it,” she said, laughing. “And please take a moment to think about your plan for voting about when and where you will vote.”
Just earlier in the day, Representative Dan Bishop, the Republican nominee for attorney general in the state, bragged that the GOP had led early voting for the first time, which caused applause.
Harris’s words acknowledged that even though she has gained ground in the polls–particularly in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan–she and the Democratic Party still have not figured out how to win North Carolina.
This isn’t to say Harris has entirely abandoned the other swing states. Earlier in the day, she campaigned in Atlanta and she plans to close out the campaign in must-win Pennsylvania. But Democrats want to keep the Tar Heel State back in their grasp.
“We had the best organization on the ground that we’ve had here since 2008,” Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee Chairman, told The Independent. That year holds a special spot in Democrats’ hearts because Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since Jimmy Carter did in 1976.
Obama would go on to lose the state to Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump would keep it in the GOP in 2016. Trump would win it again in 2020, albeit by a smaller margin.
“We win this state, we’re going to win the whole ball game,” Trump said while speaking in Gastonia. “And we’ve won it twice before, and we won it quite easily.”
Trump commented that the crowd size was about 20,000 people. Trump flipped several rural counties that historically voted for Democrats when first picked up the state and kept them in his column.
But Harrison said that the turnout in Charlotte, which the Harris campaign later said was around 10,000 people, symbolized the energy.
“Just look at this rally in North Carolina on a Saturday, football day,” he said, noting how college football was on. “And everybody’s on their feet because they understand the energy and the unity that Kamala Harris just brings.”
