North Carolina Breaks Democrats’ Hearts

This article has been updated to reflect new developments.

I can’t overstate how much Democrats wanted to win North Carolina. How much hope they invested in my state. How many reasons they found to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris could emerge victorious, succeeding where every Democratic presidential candidate this century — with the sole exception of Barack Obama in 2008 — had failed.

By all indications and reports, the Democratic turnout effort here was not only better staffed and better organized, by far, than the Republican one, but it was also, according to prominent North Carolina Democrats and seasoned political analysts, superior to anything that any Democratic presidential nominee put together in North Carolina in the past. And the state’s brisk population growth since 2020, when Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump by only about 1.3 percentage points, favored Harris, making the state’s metropolitan areas bigger and turning them bluer.

But in this fiercely contested and potentially prophetic battleground, that wasn’t enough. After several furious months of nonstop television commercials, countless yard signs, door knocking galore, cold calling ad nauseam and incessant, traffic-snarling visits from the candidates themselves, Harris came up short. Donald Trump came out on top.

And that will be examined as closely as the outcomes in any of the other major battleground states, because for the entirety of this agonizing election season, North Carolina functioned as a national mood ring and mirror, vividly reflecting all the relevant 2024 dynamics and every major plotline.

For those of us who live here, Trump’s victory didn’t simply answer the question of who’d get our state’s juicy trove of 16 electoral votes and, with them, draw closer to winning the presidency. It concluded a political melodrama of the highest and tensest order.

“I’ve never seen people as anxious,” former Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who spent more than a quarter-century in the House, told me. He said that while North Carolinians are used to swing state intensity, “this time has been different. This is no holds barred.”