What Trump and Harris’ latest stops show about the 2024 race

• Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will mostly close the 2024 race in Pennsylvania.
• But it is Trump’s campaign that is making a late push to widen its path to victory.
• Both sides also play for North Carolina.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are speaking volumes about their closing strategies by deploying the most valuable resource left in the 2024 campaign: their time.

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

Trump takes the most eye-level approach. He spent part of Friday in New Mexico and Saturday in Virginia, neither of which has voted for a Republican for president in two decades. His campaign even added a last-minute rally in New Hampshire with GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance. No major election forecast considers any of these three states a “toss”.

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

Harris may be able to expand his card without really trying. The widely respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll showed her with a 3 percentage point lead among likely voters in Iowa. Once a swing state, Iowa has swung heavily toward Republicans in recent elections, and no one thought Trump could be in danger of losing a state he easily won in 2016 and 2020. Another poll showed Trump leading state, but the biggest takeaway is Trump’s battle with older women. If it applies anywhere else in the Midwest, he’s in serious trouble.

The state that stands out the most on the chart.

Not surprisingly, Trump and Harris are focusing the bulk of their efforts on Pennsylvania, the key swing state.

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

On the other hand, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Harris would be in a bind. If Harris won Michigan and Wisconsin, she would still have to add Georgia or North Carolina to her column. Even winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona would not be enough to put her in the White House.

That’s why Trump’s decision to spend significant time in North Carolina looms large. He is set to spend the second most time in the state in the final days of the campaign, behind only Pennsylvania. Harris held a rally in Charlotte on Saturday before flying to New York to make a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

The major polling aggregators show Trump with a lead of just over a percentage point in the Tar Heel State. Despite President Obama being the only Democratic president hoping to carry the state since 2000, Trump narrowly held off President Biden there four years ago.

Some of Harris’ aides scoffed at Trump’s decision.

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

Doug Sosnik, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton and a North Carolina native, doesn’t see Harris’ path there.

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

North Carolina is “not a level playing field” for Democrats, Sosnik said, pointing to Democrats’ struggles there, aside from Obama.

“It’s competitive. It’s something worth fighting for, if she has the resources, she should persevere and maybe she could win it,” Sosnik said.

Trump’s campaign shot back that it was Harris who was actually concerned.

“President Trump is leading in every state at war, and he has been under attack in historically Democratic states like New Mexico and Virginia,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Business Insider. “Meanwhile, Kamala Harris remains on the defensive, shifting more resources to getting out the vote 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 for North Carolina this cycle is the large number of people who have moved to the state after 2020.

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

Trump also has to contend with some of his strongest counties being devastated by Hurricane Helene, leaving officials scrambling to relocate polling places.

“If North Carolina is close, if it looks like Harris is a hair ahead, I think a lot of the votes in western North Carolina are going to be canvassed to within an inch of their lives,” Roberts said, adding, that she is not convinced that every vote in the affected areas will be within the deadline.