• Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will finish the 2024 race in Pennsylvania with a majority.

• But Trump’s campaign is making a late push to widen his path to victory.

• Each side is making a play for North Carolina.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are making a big deal about their closing strategies using the most valuable resource left. 2024 campaign: their time.

The top two competitors have visited or will visit each of the seven swing states. last days of the campaign. Harris spent Friday in Wisconsin, Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina, and will cross Michigan today. Trump spent Friday in Michigan and Wisconsin, Saturday in North Carolina, and will be in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia today. Both hopefuls spent Thursday in Nevada and Arizona.

Trump takes the most remarkable approach. He spent part of Friday in New Mexico and Saturday in Virginia; Neither has voted for a Republican for president in two decades. His campaign even added a last-minute rally in New Hampshire featuring GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sen. J.D. Vance. No major election forecaster sees any of these three states as a “toss-up.”

Saturday showed that even if polls and pundits say otherwise, there may still be a surprise left in this chaotic race.

Harris can expand his map without really trying. widely respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll It showed him holding a 3 percentage point lead among likely voters in Iowa. Once a swing state, Iowa tilted heavily toward Republicans in recent elections, and no one thought Trump might be in danger of losing the state he won handily in 2016 and 2020. A different poll showed Trump leading the state, but the biggest takeaway: Trump’s struggles with older women. If this is true elsewhere in the Midwest, he’s in serious trouble.

The state that stands out the most in the program.

It’s no surprise that Trump and Harris are focusing much of their efforts on Pennsylvania, the key swing state.

Harris would win the race by holding the “Blue Wall,” Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and the Blue Dot, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. In this scenario, Trump could sweep the remaining four swing states and still come up short.

On the other hand, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Harris will be in a difficult situation. Even if Harris wins Michigan and Wisconsin, she’ll need to add Georgia or North Carolina to her column. Even winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona wouldn’t be enough to put him in the White House.

That’s why Trump’s decision to spend significant time in North Carolina looms large. He will be the person who spent the most time in the state, after Pennsylvania, in the final days of the campaign. Harris held a rally in Charlotte on Saturday before flying to New York for a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

Leading poll aggregators show Trump with a lead of just over one percentage point in the Tar Heel state. Although President Obama is the only Democratic president since 2000 to hope to carry the state, Trump narrowly stopped President Biden there four years ago.

Some of Harris’ aides mocked Trump’s decision.

“Donald Trump is worried about losing North Carolina,” Harris spokesman Ammar Moussa wrote to X under two siren emojis.

Doug Sosnik, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton and a North Carolina native, doesn’t think that’s Harris’ path.

“It’s a state that guys like me would tell you 10 years ago would be a Democratic state like Virginia, but it’s not,” Sosnik said.

Sosnik said North Carolina “is not a level playing field” for Democrats, pointing to the struggles of Democrats there other than Obama.

“There is competition. It’s something worth fighting for; if he has the resources, he should resist and maybe win,” Sosnik said.

Trump’s campaign is showing that it’s actually Harris who’s worried.

“President Trump is leading in every battleground state and is on the offensive in historically Democratic states like New Mexico and Virginia,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Business Insider. he said. “Meanwhile, Kamala Harris remains on the defensive, pouring more resources into increasing voting in black communities and sending Bill Clinton to New Hampshire.”

Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College, said one of the wild cards this cycle for North Carolina is the large number of people moving to the state post-2020.

Only two states, Florida and Texas, added more people in 2023, according to the Census Bureau. An average of 99,000 people have moved to North Carolina from other states each year since 2020, according to the Office of State Management and Budget.

Trump also has to confront the fact that some of his strongest counties were devastated by Hurricane Helene, leaving officials scrambling to relocate polling places.

“If North Carolina is close and Harris looks like she’s ahead by a hair, I think most of the votes in Western North Carolina will be scrutinized within an inch of their lives,” Roberts said. Roberts said, adding that he was not convinced that every vote was in this direction. Affected areas will be delivered by the deadline.

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