New polling data from the 2024 presidential race, where the Democratic pick is now Vice President Kamala Harris, finds the nation’s second-in-command and Democratic standard-bearer tied with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in North Carolina. Though the results were very close, Trump actually won that state in the 2020 election against Joe Biden, finishing less than one and a half percentage points ahead.
In August’s Carolina Forward Poll, both Harris and Trump nabbed 46 percent of the support from the poll’s registered voters, with six percent of the respondents undecided. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had just two percent. In May, the same pollster found Biden losing to Trump by two percentage points.
Notably, the new polling found a comparatively large share of the state’s independents identifying as undecided: 20 percent. Twenty-nine percent of that group went with Harris, while 42 percent backed Trump.
This polling adds to a tidal wave of such data that looks promising for Democrats in the wake of Harris taking over for President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket for the year. Harris has recently been campaigning in a slew of electoral battleground states, showing up in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and beyond — a list that was originally meant to include North Carolina, although the arrival of severe weather spurred the postponing of such plans.
Though Trump’s running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has been out on the campaign trail, Trump himself has been mostly absent, though he held a rally last week in Montana — which is not a swing state in presidential elections.
The day before that event, Trump conducted a widely panned press conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, complaining to assembled media about Harris being Democrats’ presidential election pick at all. Trump has recently been talking about an imagined scenario in which Biden — who endorsed Harris — tries to get back the nomination after all… something that there’s no evidence is actually coming down the rhetorical pipe.
