VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A handful of states hold the key to the White House, as final ballots start to roll in. One of them is the battleground state of North Carolina.
Political experts said the Tar Heel State is one the president needs.
“Nearly 4.6 million North Carolinians have cast ballots in this election,” said North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell.
Sixty-two percent of North Carolina’s voters already voted. Still, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said roughly 3 million of their more than 7 million registered voters have yet to vote.
Of those who already cast a ballot during early voting, close to a million sent in by-mail. Election officials are waiting for approximately 149,000 absentee ballots to come back.
“North Carolina has been close in the last three or four presidential elections,” said Wason Center Academic Director Quentin Kidd.
North Carolina has become a battleground state. Kidd said that’s based upon where most of the votes come from regionally.
“The years where Republicans do really well, it’s because rural North Carolina really shows up to vote, urban North Carolina doesn’t do much,” Kidd said.
North Carolina turned blue in 2008 when urban and suburban voters showed up to vote for President Barack Obama. President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and experts said he needs to keep it.
“If Donald Trump does not win in North Carolina, he is almost assuredly not going to be president,” said North Carolina State University Political Professor Steven Greene.
Greene said the state’s 15 electoral votes aren’t essential to the Biden campaign, because Biden also leads in the battleground state of Arizona.
“If Joe Biden doesn’t win in North Carolina he has a lot of other opportunities,” Greene said.
Greene said other races in North Carolina raise the stakes.
“A lot of people think control of the U.S. Senate may very well come down to the Senate race in North Carolina, whether that is [Democrat] Cal Cunningham or Republican incumbent Thom Tillis.”
The U.S. Supreme Court allowed North Carolina’s board of elections to extend their date to receive and count mail-in ballots to November 12.
The North Carolina Elections Board expects to report 97 percent of votes Tuesday. Kidd said the extension might cause a backlash.
“If after all the votes are counted, it is a dead heat, then that extension could really matter,” Kidd said. “That is when we could see North Carolina become part of litigation over if those extended votes should be counted or not.”
Mail-in votes will be accepted up to the 12th in North Carolina if they are postmarked by Election Day.