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North Carolina Moves to Toss-up, Setting Up November Battle for Magnificent Seven Swing States


KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

—North Carolina moves from Leans Republican to Toss-up in our Electoral College ratings, further emphasizing a focus on 7 key swing states to the exclusion of almost everywhere else.

—Kamala Harris is actually polling slightly better in North Carolina than Georgia, but there are reasons to think she’ll still perform a little better in the latter (see Map 2 below).

—The relative ordering of the swing states does often change from election to election, and that has been the case for the key 7 states, for the most part, over the past 6 elections.

—Polling generally suggests a similar ordering of the states to 2020, although Republicans are polling better than one might expect in Nevada and Democrats better in Wisconsin, two states where presidential polling errors have not been uncommon recently.

Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College rating change

State Old Rating New Rating
North Carolina Leans Republican Toss-up

Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings

North Carolina and the order of the swing states

Ever since the 2020 presidential election, it seemed clear that so long as the 2024 presidential election was reasonably competitive and reasonably comparable to 2020, the campaign’s focus would be on 7 key swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Industrial North, Georgia and North Carolina in the southeast, and Arizona and Nevada out west. These were the only 7 states that were each decided by 3 points or less in 2020, and President Biden won 6 of the 7 (all but North Carolina) on the way to the presidency. Former President Trump, meanwhile, won 6 of the 7 (all but Nevada) in winning the presidency in 2016.

As Democrats meet in Chicago, the 2024 campaign’s overall focus remains trained on these states—so much so that it’s hard to give an immediate edge to either candidate in any of them. That includes the Tar Heel State, the only truly close state that eluded Biden’s grasp in 2020. We are moving it from Leans Republican to Toss-up.

This is the first time this cycle that we have moved any electoral votes away from the Republican column into the Toss-up column. With this, the number of electoral votes at least leaning to Trump is now 219, down from 235. We previously did this to Democrats earlier in the cycle, when we moved Pennsylvania and then Michigan from their column, reducing their “at least leaning” total from 260 down to the current 226. Beyond the 7 states in the Toss-up category, only a single electoral vote remains in the Leans column—Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which is Leans Democratic. Everything else is in the Likely or Safe columns on either side.

North Carolina voted for Barack Obama by a tiny margin in 2008—the first time since 1976 that the state had voted Democratic for president—but it moved back to the Republican column, backing GOP candidates for president by roughly 2, 3.5, and 1.5 points the last three elections, respectively. Polling there has been very tight of late, part of a broader improvement for Kamala Harris as she quickly became the Democratic presidential nominee in all but name just a couple of days following President Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid almost exactly a month ago (more on the polls below).

There also has been a longer-running argument about the possibility that North Carolina might be a better target for Democrats than Georgia. This argument would have been very reasonable in past cycles but seemed odd during this one, given that Georgia had voted narrowly for Biden in 2020. As of now, Harris’s polling is very modestly better in North Carolina than Georgia. We do still think Georgia is likelier than not to vote to the left of North Carolina again in 2024, despite the polls.

Georgia has a larger Black electorate than North Carolina does, and while the Tar Heel State does have growing metro areas that are getting bluer—specifically Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham—Greater Atlanta, which has driven the state’s shift from red to purple, is just a much more significant part of Georgia. As shown in Map 2, Biden won the Atlanta metropolitan statistical area, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as the combined Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham metro areas by similar margins. But the Atlanta-centered MSA accounted for a much larger share of the total Georgia vote than the combined Charlotte/Raleigh/Durham MSAs did of the total North Carolina vote. This allowed Biden to win Georgia even though the non-Atlanta part of the Peach State was considerably redder than the remaining part of North Carolina.

Map 2: Georgia vs. North Carolina, 2020 election

Note: Map by Associate Editor J. Miles Coleman

The larger Black population in Georgia paired with the stronger sway of Atlanta are a couple of points in favor of Georgia remaining slightly bluer than North Carolina.

All that said, both states are close enough—and similar enough to the other key swing states in this election—that we don’t think it makes sense to rate one as Toss-up and the other as Leans Republican anymore. Hence our rating change today. And although we suspect that the ordering of the 7 key states will be similar to 2020 if not identical, it’s also common for state positioning relative to other states (and the nation as a whole) to change from election to election.

Table 2 shows the presidential margins in the 7 aforementioned key states over the last 6 presidential elections, ranked top to bottom from most Republican to most Democratic (the national margin is also included, as “US”).

Table 2: Key swing states ordered from most Democratic to most Republican, 2000-2020

Source: Presidential margins are from Dave Leip’s Atlas of United States Presidential Elections

The relative ordering of the states has generally changed from election to election—except for 2008 and 2012, when they all finished in the exact same order—although there are some basic patterns. Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—each of which has voted Democratic just a single time in the timeframe covered—occupied the 3 most Republican slots in each of these elections, albeit often in different order. Michigan was the most Democratic in every election except for 2016, when Nevada was most Democratic (and the only state among these that year to not back Trump). The last election, 2020, was the only one where all of these states voted to the right of the national popular vote, illustrating a Republican bias in the Electoral College that probably will continue to some degree in 2024, albeit perhaps not to such an extent.

Table 2 helps provide some historical background to Table 3, which shows the current polling averages from a trio of polling aggregators: RealClearPolitics, FiveThirtyEight, and RacetotheWH.

Table 3: Presidential election margins in polling averages

Source: Polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics, FiveThirtyEight, and RacetotheWH as of the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 20.

The polling bolsters the case for North Carolina to be a Toss-up, given that the race there is basically a tie right now, and its polling is broadly in line with the other 7 states (although there is, of course, variation). The familiar 2000-2020 electoral pattern of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina being redder than Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is also present in the polls. It is perhaps a little surprising to see Nevada polling among the redder group (at least in the “average of averages”), although Harris is actually slightly ahead in 2 of the 3 averages in Nevada. Regardless, Nevada is the one state on this list where we have a fair amount of experience with polls understating Democrats. On the flip side, Democratic margins were routinely and often heavily overestimated in Wisconsin polls in both 2016 and 2020, so it being the second-bluest state in these averages merits a little skepticism too.

We do think Michigan is still the best candidate to be the bluest state among these in 2024 again, and North Carolina the best candidate to be the reddest, but it wouldn’t take much to change this alignment in some way. It’s not a stretch to imagine Arizona moving to the left of Nevada, given that the latter is more working-class and thus perhaps more amenable to the current GOP than historically Republican but more suburban-focused Arizona. We addressed the differences between Georgia and North Carolina above. Again, we’re skeptical North Carolina will be more Democratic than Georgia, but there’s also not a ton of daylight between the pair, currently. And all 7 of these states are close enough that we think they should be grouped together in our ratings, at least at the moment.

Now that the election is getting closer and we are almost past the conventions, the polls probably should carry more weight, imperfect instruments though they are. We’ll be watching to see if Harris can maintain or build upon these polling numbers after the Democratic National Convention concludes. If so, it may be that one or more of these “Magnificent Seven,” to borrow the famous movie title, won’t be Toss-ups anymore.