Democrats’ hopes of flipping NC in 2024 may be tripped by two new obstacles | Opinion

As the 2024 presidential campaign unofficially kicks off with Wednesday’s GOP debate, a familiar claim is popping up about North Carolina’s role in deciding who will be the nation’s next president.

It’s being said that 2024 is the year that North Carolina will put its Electoral College votes in the Democratic column.

That’s what Hillary Clinton thought when she closed her 2016 campaign with a rally in Raleigh. In 2020, President Joe Biden thought he had a shot at making North Carolina go the way of Virginia and Georgia. They were wrong.

Even former President Barack Obama, who in 2008 became the only Democrat to carry the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976, couldn’t repeat the feat in 2012.

The reasons for Democrats’ hopefulness are also familiar. They’re based on the state’s growth, its changing demographics and recent voting patterns. North Carolina’s population has increased faster than the national average since 2020, with the growth concentrated in heavily blue urban areas. And former President Donald Trump’s hold on the state slipped. He won it by 3.6 percent in 2016 and only 1.4 percent in 2020, the closest result of all states.

In her recent newsletter, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin put North Carolina among the states likeliest to flip from Trump to Biden. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign announced on Sunday that it has included North Carolina among the battleground states where it will focus a 16-week, $25 million ad campaign.

But those who see the bluing of North Carolina from the outside may not be accounting for two developments on the inside.

On Aug. 13, the State Board of Elections certified the so-called centrist party known as No Labels to appear on the North Carolina ballot. The new entry has the support of former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, a No Labels national co-chairman.

There’s no way a No Labels candidate can win, but in a state as closely split as North Carolina, a party billing itself as a common sense, centrist alternative could certainly be a spoiler for Biden’s hopes here.

Rick Wilson, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a political action committee created by anti-Trump Republicans, is concerned about No Labels. Wilson told me last week, “The way we modeled it, the way we looked at it repeatedly, it’s going to end as something that draws off conservative Democrats in key Electoral College states and hands the election to Donald Trump.”

Wilson said that while No Labels does not disclose its donors, it is known to have the support of hedge fund and oil and gas industry leaders who “want to elect Trump without having their fingerprints all over it.”

The second obstacle for Democrats is an all-out push for voter suppression by Republican state lawmakers.

Last week the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed legislation that eliminated the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots postmarked before or on Election Day, but received afterward. That change comes on top of a new photo ID requirement for in-person and mail-in voters. There will also be a new signature verification set for mail-in ballots.

These changes would cause enough contention and confusion by themselves, but Republican lawmakers may compound those effects by leaving many voters in the dark about the changes.

The State Board of Elections has asked the legislature for $6.5 million to implement the new voter photo ID requirements, including educating poll workers and voters about the changes. But it’s not known how much, if any, of that money will be provided in the next state budget. The proposed House budget only funded half of the request. The proposed Senate budget included none of the funding.

Trends within North Carolina’s electorate do point to the state going into the Democratic column in the next presidential election. But No Labels could siphon thousands of would-be Democratic votes and new voting requirements – and the confusion about them – could disproportionately disqualify Democratic voters.

It’s going to take more than a demographic trend for Biden to win North Carolina. He’s going to need a blue wave.

This story was originally published August 21, 2023 at 1:06 PM.