Donald Trump secured North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes Tuesday night in what looks like a successful bid to reclaim the presidency he lost in 2020. Trump, the Republican nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, held multiple rallies in the swing state before Election Day.
Trump was leading Harris by 51% to 47.8%, with 98% of the North Carolina vote counted.
“We’re running a campaign of solutions to save America, an America which they have virtually destroyed,” Trump said of the Biden-Harris administration last Wednesday at a rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Trump narrowly won North Carolina in 2020 with 49.9% of the vote, defeating Democrat Joe Biden, who earned 48.6% but went on to win the White House. Trump also won North Carolina in 2016, defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In a pre-election analysis, pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News that Harris needed to win North Carolina or Georgia to secure the presidential election. CBS News, NBC News, and Fox News declared Trump the winner in Georgia early Wednesday morning.
North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, which contains 19 counties, was expected to determine which candidate won the state.
Nash and Pasquotank counties are both in that district and Biden won both by fewer than 200 votes in 2020. However, Trump earned nearly 1,000 more votes by Tuesday than Harris did in both counties.
Scotland County was expected to be a bellwether county in North Carolina. In 2020, Trump won Scotland County by fewer than 300 votes out of 14,855 cast. This time, Trump won it by over 1,000 votes out of 14,548.
Trump also made inroads with black voters in North Carolina. NBC News reported that blacks make up about 19% of the state’s electorate and that Trump won over 12% of the black vote. His margins increased by 12 percentage points among black men, NBC said.
Economic issues were front and center for many North Carolina voters.
“In talking with my friends, neighbors, and business associates, most of us felt that a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for four more years of the same,” North Carolina business owner Fred George told The Daily Signal on Tuesday night.
“Inflation, stagnation, rampant illegal immigration, and pushing values that are just not in keeping with our way of life,” George said. “We were mostly better off under Trump’s first term and prefer to go back to that.”
