These Democratic Voters Hiding in Plain Sight Could Be Harris' Ticket to a North Carolina Win

Taylor, a corporate bankruptcy attorney and Pod Save America devotee, is a small part of a large effort. Mecklenburg is the second-biggest county in a state that is tied for the second-most electoral votes among the seven swing states — but it holds North Carolina’s single biggest stockpile of Democrats. It’s also of late had a dubious record of conspicuously abysmal turnout. Drive up that rate, in the estimation of Drew Kromer, the 27-year-old first-term chair of the county party, get the many Democrats here to vote the way they could and should, and Mecklenburg can be on a vanishingly short list of the most politically consequential counties in the country — every bit as salient as Maricopa County in Arizona, or Fulton County in Georgia, and maybe a or even the reason Kamala Harris and not Donald Trump is inaugurated as the president early next year. “This is the gold mine,” Kromer told me. “This is where you’re going to make it happen.”

Since Kromer, a data buff and self-described politics nerd, got elected chair in April 2023, the county party has upped exponentially its fundraising, its paid staff, its roster of volunteers and its canvassing and phone-banking and all-around organizational oomph. It established a template of sorts by helping to flip from red to blue basically the entire town government of Huntersville — the area’s most populous suburb by far. The resources, of course, of the Harris campaign dwarf those of this or any other county party, but the so-called Meck Dems for their part have built themselves up to be a much more ready and robust partner in the coordinated campaign ramped up for this stretch run. “What the local party has pulled off is pretty remarkable,” Jeff Jackson, the Charlotte congressman and candidate for attorney general, told me. “A GOTV effort at this level,” he said, using the acronym for get out the vote, “has never been tried before here. It’s a huge experiment in how to do GOTV effectively, but it could also end up picking the president.”

It could. But it’s still a hard and heavy lift — perhaps especially after Hurricane Helene ravaged the reliably blue dots of Asheville and Boone in largely red western North Carolina, injecting into the fine political calculus an utterly unknowable variable and potentially raising the bar of the tallies required in the state’s other bigger, bluer cities. Democrats in these parts lament a sort of complacency that keeps vote counts down precisely because Democratic wins are so assured; in a county where the vast majority of elected officials are Democrats, Mecklenburg is paradoxically so blue it doesn’t act as blue as it actually is. Contributing, too, though, to the turnout trough is the territory many here call “the crescent” — this city’s eastern and western reaches that are generally not as wealthy and white as the portions north and south. And Precinct 200, a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood not far from the airport where Taylor was canvassing, has been a particular challenge. Even the reinvigorated county party hasn’t been able to find somebody to serve as the precinct chair. “They’re not the easy knock,” Leah Smart, a senior organizer for the county party, told me. “They’ve never been the easy knock, and they never will be the easy knock — but they are in a lot of instances the most important knock.”




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