The mailbox at the end of my driveway is crammed to bursting with political fliers. My phone chirps with text after text from pollsters and get-out-the-vote activists. Every weekend, I get stuck in the traffic overflow from yet another candidate's event. And I can't turn on the TV without seeing endless commercials for Donald Trump, for Kamala Harris, for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein (the commercials for Mark Robinson, his Republican opponent, abruptly stopped a few weeks ago, after he was outed as a fan of trans porn and a self-proclaimed "black Nazi"). That's right, I live in North Carolina, one of this year's crucial swing states.
My state started early voting this week and promptly got stampeded by candidates and canvassers. Nobody can tour the western region around Asheville, where they're still digging out from Hurricane Helene, but the rest of the state was one big rally. The Democrats gave us Harris filling the Eastern Carolina University coliseum in Greenville, then running mate Tim Walz in the central cities of Durham and Winston-Salem, and then Bill Clinton hitting a bunch of small towns on a bus tour. The Republicans sent veep pick J.D. Vance to speak in Wilmington on the coast, while Trump will swing by a suburb of Charlotte next week. It's unclear whether all this electioneering will make a difference. North Carolina is often called purple, but we're really more of a deep magenta. We haven't voted for a Democrat for president since 2008. It's true that we often split our ballots and pick a Democratic governor even when we prefer the Republican as president — but that might just be a reflection of a state GOP that is much further to the right than the average Carolinian and offers extremists as nominees
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