Biden, Trump still locked in a tight race in NC, a pivotal state for each
Just days before the election, Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump remain locked in a tight race in North Carolina, where two-thirds of likely voters may already have cast their ballots.
Sixty-four percent of likely N.C. voters have voted, according to a New York Times/Siena College Poll released Thursday.
The survey found Biden up by 3 points in the state Trump won by nearly 4 in 2016. Other polls suggest an even closer race. Real Clear Politics average of seven recent polls shows a virtual tie, with Biden up by less than a point.
“The race for the White House runs through the Old North State, and we’re still deadlocked here with Biden and Trump flip-flopping one-point leads since August,” Donald Bryson, president of the Civitas Institute, said in a statement Wednesday, a day after their poll showed Biden up by a single point.
Analysts say the state and its 15 electoral votes are crucial to Trump’s path to victory and less so for Biden. The president is underscoring that with a rally in Fayetteville Monday, the day before the election. It will be his ninth visit to the state since being renominated at the GOP convention in Charlotte in August.
The campaigns and their allies have spent more than $147 million on ads in North Carolina, according to Advertising Analytics. That’s more than in all but Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Gender gaps
Virtually every survey finds wide gender gaps for each candidate.
In North Carolina, Trump has a sizable lead among men, 55%-41% according to a WRAL-TV poll this week.
“I look back at his record and see what he’s done the last four years and nobody else is even close,” said voter William Miller, 71, of Cornelius. “I like that he puts America first. The first time I voted for him was for the change. This time I voted for him because of what he’s done.”
Biden, on the other hand, enjoys a comfortable — 54%-41% — lead among women, the WRAL poll found.
Cassandra Restrepo of Cornelius voted for Trump in 2016. This year she went with Biden. Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for the 34-year-old nurse practitioner. She didn’t like the revelations that Trump knew about the danger of the novel coronavirus while downplaying the threat publicly.
“If I have a patient who has a bad diagnosis . . . you give them every (treatment) option whether it’s a bad one or not,” she said. “If you put all the facts on the table and let people make their own decisions maybe things would have turned out differently.”
Polls, of course, are an uncertain predictor.
On Halloween in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton had a 3.3-point lead in North Carolina, according to Real Clear Politics. By the election eight days later, the lead had disappeared. Clinton later blamed then-FBI Director Jim Comey for her loss. Two days before the election he spoke again about her email server, injecting the controversial issue back into the news.
John Aldrich, a political scientist at Duke University, said Clinton was the insider in an election when Trump was the outsider. Now he’s the incumbent with a record to defend. And polls show there are fewer undecided voters left to persuade.
“It’s not as easy for Trump to gain ground for those reasons,” he said.
Black voter turnout
Frank Hill, former chief of staff for GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole, said pollsters in 2016 overestimated the African American vote and underestimated the state’s white, rural vote. He thinks that may be happening again.
“They were being very optimistic that the Black turnout would be higher and I think they kind of forgot about the rural voters,” he said.
Seventy-two percent of Black voters in the New York Times/Siena poll said they’ve already voted, compared with 64% of white voters. Numbers from the State Board of Elections show that Black voters make up 19.8% of early- and absentee voters. They comprise 20.6% of registered voters.
Sean Grier, a Democratic strategist from Charlotte, said he’s confident Black voters will go to the polls before early-voting ends Saturday afternoon. He said a “Souls to the Polls” effort, usually held on Sundays during early voting, will take place Saturday.
“I think you’re going to see a heavy push for our Souls to the Polls Saturday,” he said.
The Times poll showed that 76% of N.C. Democrats said they already voted compared with 58% of Republicans. Biden is expected to win the early voting. But Republicans traditionally show up in greater numbers on Election Day.
In 2016, Clinton won 49.8% of the early vote to Trump’s 46.9%. But Trump got 55% of Election Day votes to Clinton’s 39%.
He also won the absentee vote, which was a fraction of what it is today.
This story was originally published October 29, 2020 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Biden, Trump still locked in a tight race in NC, a pivotal state for each."
