NY Times: “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.”