Trump wins North Carolina, holding on to a key state for Republicans in the 2024 election

Former President Donald Trump has won North Carolina, NBC News projects, taking the first major battleground in the election so far and cementing the GOP’s hold on the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Polls had shown Vice President Kamala Harris cutting into Trump’s lead in North Carolina when she entered the race in July after President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid.

Democrats had been optimistic that Harris could gain ground among educated voters in the state’s Research Triangle area, a robust voting bloc.

But while the NBC News Exit Poll in North Carolina finds Harris holding on to Biden’s 2020 performance among college-educated voters in the state, Trump made gains among black and young voters and marginal gains among independents.

Black voters made up 19% of voters according to the exit poll. And Trump won over 12% of them, a 5-point increase from 2020, including a 12-point increase among black men.

But North Carolina was always an elusive prize for Democrats. No Democratic nominee has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008. (Obama lost the state to GOP rival Mitt Romney four years later.) Before Obama came along, the last Democrat to capture North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976 .

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Trump’s victory in North Carolina underscores the resilience of his MAGA political movement. It is the third time in a row that he has won the battleground state, although he was tried twice as president and indicted in four separate criminal cases after he left office in 2021.

That he remains a viable political force underscores both voters’ dissatisfaction with the status quo in Washington and their belief that Trump is the antidote.

Harris’ most promising path to victory always involved the three so-called blue wall states that Trump won in his upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Still, Democrats grew hopeful that she would pull off a victory in North Carolina, which could have shown the party had a path to victory even in states with large rural populations. About a third of North Carolinians live in rural areas.

A few unexpected developments put the result in North Carolina in doubt. Hurricane Helene caused enormous damage in the western part of the state and the city of Asheville. Trump sought to capitalize politically on the Biden administration’s response to the storm.

Harris took pains to assure North Carolina residents that the opposite was true. On a visit to the state in early October, she attended a briefing of officials involved in the recovery and met workers at distribution points for food and vital supplies. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, praised the federal government’s handling of the storm and said emergency workers had been on the ground providing assistance throughout.

Another shock came in September, then It was reported by CNN that North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, had posted inflammatory comments on a porn site ten years ago. Robinson declined to make the comments.

Before the article came out, Trump had praised Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” But the allegations proved an unwanted distraction for the former president. When he appeared in the state at a rally in the wake of the CNN report, he did not mention Robinson’s name.

Robinson lost his race to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein on Tuesday.