by I was waiting outside the PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, North Carolina after Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally when my phone started blowing up. Ann Selzer, Iowa’s vaunted pollster, had just dropped a poll that showed Harris ahead of Trump by three points in the Hawkeye State — a state Trump won twice. Everyone in the political world wanted to talk about it.
The Trump campaign knew how bad this news looked. Tony Fabrizio and Tim Saler, the Trump campaign’s data men, issued a memo addressing the results almost immediately.
Shortly thereafter, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris ahead in North Carolina, as well as Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. If Harris wins all four, she wouldn’t even need to win Pennsylvania, Arizona or Michigan to win the entire election.
By the time these polls dropped, I might have been surprised by his edge, but I wasn’t surprised that the Harris campaign had a different appetite. That’s because I had spent much of Saturday following the two presidential candidates around North Carolina on the final weekend of the campaign and it was clear to me that Harris had all the momentum, while Trump was landing on straws.
As I waited outside the pavilion for the Harris Rally, a few older white women were worried they would miss Harris speaking. After the rally, another person — Janice Lewis, who said she was from Davidson, North Carolina — told me that not only was she going to the rally but that she had made a phone call to the deputy already president and that she had given money to the Harris campaign.
This is consistent with what the Selzer poll showed – specifically that senior women, meaning women age 65 and older, support Harris by a whopping 2-to-1 margin. Many of these women remember past lives Rua v Wade and was infuriated by the Dobbs v Jackson a decision that killed him. Many probably also remember the wound that came when Trump saw Hillary Clinton beat him.
Before Trump took the stage at the Gastonia Municipal Airport as part of the final campaign weekend, billboards on either side of the stage featured images of immigrants packing a hospital. “Kamala Harris promised free health care to illegals,” read the statement overlayed across the image. “They are coming to collect.”
Another showed trashed Haiti, with the statement “Kamala’s border plan: Make America Haiti”. Meanwhile, the interactive billboards would show Trump’s proposed promises of no taxes on tips and Social Security.
To be sure, there was a long and winding line in the mostly suburban county where many front lawns were lined with giant Trump banners. Some supporters were adorned in garbage bags. Many people were unruly as the rally played clips before his appearance at Wrestlemania and the packed audience took out their phones as Trump walked to “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood. But when he mentioned his proposal of no taxes on tips and got little response, he seemed to be on the mend.
“That’s not too good – do any of you work in restaurants?” he said. “Because when I do that in Nevada, when I do that in Las Vegas, I say ‘no tax on tips,’ I have to stop talking.” It was a telling moment.
Trump didn’t have as many reps that day, either — surprising, considering how close it was to Election Day. (Mark Robinson, the incumbent gubernatorial candidate, has been virtually exiled by the Trump campaign, so that doesn’t help.) Although two congressional candidates spoke, as did the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, the only other statewide candidate. who joined Trump on stage was Representative Dan Bishop, who will lose the race for attorney general to Democrat Jeff Jackson. Poor Hal Weatherman, the candidate for lieutenant governor, was allowed to shake hands outside the rally but did not speak.
At Harris’ rally in Charlottesville later that same day, many women were wearing shirts with the slogan “Childless Cat Lady”. One particularly clever (in my humble opinion) said: “It’s me, I’m the cat lady” (a reference to Harris’ most famous endorsement, Taylor Swift.)
I arrived late to Harris’s speech, having finished up at Trump’s. But even as I was being escorted to the press, I could not only hear Harris’s booming voice, but the crowd’s response to it as well. By the time I got to my seat, the crowd had jumped to their feet to give standing ovations several times.
Of course, rallies are an imperfect barometer of campaign momentum. Trump himself has often cited his rallies as a sign that he is winning even when he is down in the polls. But the fact that the former president decided to go to North Carolina and spend three days at rallies from Gastonia to Greensboro to Kinston to Raleigh showed that he is sweating the state.
During the Democratic National Convention, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, made a reference to Sir Isaac Newton, saying that things in motion tend to stay in motion. The same can be said about the Harris campaign. When I covered Walz’s Harris Rally in Arizona, the energy was electric — and now, across the country in Charlotte, there seemed to be no signs of that electricity fading.
As I waited for my bus to arrive in Charlotte in the late afternoon, I noticed another sign: someone in the station was watching Harris’ speech on his phone.
