Trump wins North Carolina, holding a key state for Republicans

Former President Donald Trump has won North Carolina, NBC News projects, taking the first major major battleground of the election so far and cementing the GOP’s hold on the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Polls had shown Vice President Kamala Harris cutting into Trump’s lead in North Carolina when she entered the race in July, after President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid.

Democrats had been optimistic that Harris could make gains among well-educated voters in the state's Research Triangle area, a robust voting bloc.

But while the NBC News Exit Poll of North Carolina finds Harris holding steady with Biden's 2020 performance among college-educated voters in the state, Trump made gains among Black voters and young voters and marginal gains among independents.

Black voters made up 19% of the electorate, according to the exit poll. And Trump won over 12% of them, a 5-point increase from 2020, including a 12-point increase among Black men.

But North Carolina was always an elusive prize for Democrats. No Democratic nominee has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008. (Obama lost the state to his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, four years later.) Before Obama came along, the last Democrat to capture North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

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Trump’s victory in North Carolina underscores the resilience of his MAGA political movement. It is the third straight time he has won the battleground state, even though he was impeached twice as president and indicted in four separate criminal cases after he left office in 2021.

That he remains a viable political force underscores both voters’ disenchantment with the status quo in Washington and their faith that Trump is the antidote.

Harris’ most promising path to victory always involved the three so-called blue wall states that Trump won in his upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.Still, Democrats grew hopeful she would eke out a win in North Carolina, which might have shown the party had a path to victory even in states with large rural populations. About one-third of North Carolinians live in rural areas.

A couple of unexpected developments threw the outcome in North Carolina into doubt. Hurricane Helene caused enormous damage in the western part of the state and the city of Asheville. Trump sought to capitalize politically on the Biden administration’s response to the storm.

Harris took pains to assure North Carolina residents that the opposite was true. In a visit to the state in early October, she attended a briefing of officials involved in the recovery and met workers at distribution points for food and vital supplies. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, commended the federal government’s handling of the storm, saying emergency workers had been on the ground providing assistance throughout.

Another shock came in September, when CNN reported that North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, had posted incendiary comments on a porn site a decade ago. Robinson denied making the comments.

Before the article came out, Trump had praised Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” But the allegations proved to be an unwanted distraction for the former president. When he appeared in the state for a rally in the wake of the CNN report, he didn’t mention Robinson’s name.

Robinson lost his race to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein on Tuesday.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com