NC will reprint ballots: RFK Jr. wins his case to get out of the state’s presidential race
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name won’t be on ballots in North Carolina this year, as the state Supreme Court ruled Monday night that officials must reprint nearly 3 million ballots it finished printing last month.
WRAL reports the ruling will push North Carolina past the legal deadline to start sending out ballots by at least two weeks, at the cost of about $1 million to state taxpayers — but the Supreme Court it was worth it to ensure no voter confusion caused by having Kennedy’s name on the ballots even though he suspended his campaign last month and endorsed GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Republican insiders have been behind the effort to remove Kennedy’s name, concerned that if he did appear on the ballot, he could hurt Trump’s chances of winning in North Carolina — a state where Trump won by 4.5% of the vote in 2016 but just 1.3% in 2020.”
Harris Sees Surge in Volunteers in North Carolina
“For months, the Biden team insisted that North Carolina was within reach, but Biden struggled to overtake Trump partly because of his failure to motivate younger voters. Now, the Harris campaign says it’s seeing an unprecedented rush of volunteers in the state, especially young adults,” NBC News reports.
“Since Harris became the presumptive nominee, another campaign official said, more than 20,000 new volunteers have signed up… Nearly 2,000 North Carolinians signed up to volunteer during Tuesday night’s debate, almost a quarter of them students at campus watch parties.”
Harris puts pressure on Trump in an elusive battleground: North Carolina
“Harris has raised Democratic hopes of winning North Carolina, a populous battleground that has been just beyond their grasp since Barack Obama briefly turned it blue in 2008. The elusive prize represents the party’s best chance of winning a state Biden couldn’t in 2020, and the race here is a dead heat about eight weeks before Election Day, according to nonpartisan analysts and strategists from both parties. Harris, who was back campaigning in the state Thursday, has energized voters in a way Biden could not, Democratic organizers said, forcing Republicans to expend significant resources here.”
In Narrowly Divided North Carolina, a Light Blue County Is Key for Harris
“Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.
…“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.””