Trump and Harris make last-minute stops in North Carolina

North Carolina has landed on the Republican side of the ledger in presidential elections for much of the last five decades. But this year, the state is a true toss-up.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have invested considerably in the state — and the candidates are holding multiple events across the state on Saturday.

Donald Trump held a rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, this afternoon — home to about 80,000 people on the outskirts of Charlotte, the state’s largest city.

This evening, Trump will hold another rally in Greensboro, the state’s third-largest city and home to its historic textile and furniture industry.

He is slated to return to the state again on Sunday and Monday — though he is also slated to hit other swing states those day, too.

After a Saturday afternoon rally in Atlanta, Harris traveled to Charlotte for an event alongside North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and musicians Jon Bon Jovi and Khalid.

The state has tantalized Democrats for years

When Barack Obama won it in 2008, it was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had done so since 1976. Despite a lot of attention from his reelection campaign, Obama narrowly lost the state in 2012.

Trump carried the state by three percentage points in 2016 and a point and a half in 2020 — but changing demographics could boost Harris’ chances here.

There has been rapid growth in the so-called Research Triangle in the last 20 years, home to North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leading to an increase in the state’s population of college-educated voters – who are more likely to be Harris supporters.

There has also been a sharp rise in the Latino and Asian American population, and about 1 in 5 voters is Black.

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But Republicans have a large advantage with white voters without college degrees, and have also focused on outreach in the parts of the state impacted heavily by Hurricane Helene, many of which were conservative communities.

Trump won 52% of the vote in the counties designated by FEMA as qualifying for assistance under its updated disaster declaration, according to an NPR analysis. And when the heavily Democratic Mecklenburg County is excluded, Trump won 63% of disaster-affected counties.

Starkly different closing arguments

In her final days on the trail, Vice President Harris plans to focus on the specific things she hopes to do to improve the lives of Americans from all walks of life, according to officials from her campaign.

That is the theme of a two-minute television ad slated to air during NFL football games on Sunday, including the swing-state match-up between Green Bay Packers vs. Detroit Lions. The campaign says it hopes to reach people less likely to cast ballots who may not have made up their mind about the candidates.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, told reporters she is feeling optimistic that undecided voters have been breaking in Harris’ direction in the final days of the campaign.

“We still know there’s some left, and we want to make sure we are the last people that voters are hearing from before they go vote,” O’Malley Dillon said.

In contrast, Trump has focused squarely on economic tariffs, immigrants – and on Harris herself.

In a Saturday post on his platform Truth Social, Trump said that his opponent “is slumping to the finish line, yawning, shrieking, and cackling” calling Harris “a Low IQ individual.”

At his afternoon rally in Gastonia, N.C., Trump repeated his calls for the death penalty for any migrant who kills any American citizen or law enforcement officer.

Trump also spent several minutes defending his assertion that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”

“What I do is very controversial. I don’t care. I do the right thing,” Trump said. “I want to protect women, I want to protect our men, I want to protect children. I want to protect everybody.”

He recounted asking a previous rally crowd about the remark: “Is there any woman that would be offended by the fact that I said ‘I am going to protect you as your president’?”

Trump said no one raised their hands and, later, said that one woman raised her hand. He joked — sharing shouted comments from rally-goers — that it could have been Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, or “a woman who transitioned.”

NPR’s Sarah McCammon contributed to this report from Gastonia, N.C.