When Democrats try to explain why their party has lost every presidential and Senate race in North Carolina since 2008, they often point to an unexpected place: Mecklenburg County, which includes the deep-blue city of Charlotte.
As the largest city in what has become a hotly contested swing state, Charlotte, which has a diverse and rapidly growing population of more than 900,000, should theoretically play a role almost as vital to the Democratic Party as Atlanta or Philadelphia.
Despite laying claim to more registered Democrats than any other county in the state, Mecklenburg has consistently underperformed for the party. In the 2022 midterms, only seven of North Carolina’s 100 counties had a lower voter turnout than Mecklenburg. For the 2020 presidential election, the county’s turnout was two to seven percentage points lower than those of other major Democratic counties in the state, including Wake, which includes Raleigh.
“If those voters punched up to their political weight, then you see a state that shifts from slightly right to slightly left,” Michael Bitzer, an expert on North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., said of Mecklenburg Democrats.
This year, with both presidential candidates courting North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes, the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party is making a concerted effort to deliver on its potential. Since taking office in April 2023, Drew Kromer, the 27-year-old party chairman, has loudly tried to persuade longtime residents, newcomers and wealthy donors who lean Democratic that their county will be the difference maker.
“In Mecklenburg, countywide, we have an opportunity to swing our state and to swing our country,” said Mr. Kromer, an employment lawyer. “Mecklenburg is an opportunity. But without Mecklenburg, we will single-handedly mess it up for the entire state because they can only do so much. They need us to perform.”
The county party has raised more than $2 million this year, Mr. Kromer said, a staggering jump from the $152,000 it raised in 2020. That money has allowed Mr. Kromer to hire 23 staff members; the last time the party had a single paid staff member was in 2013.
The party has also recruited more than 4,500 volunteers across the county, which has the most registered Democrats — about 304,000 — in the state. Roughly 19 percent of registered voters in Mecklenburg County identify as Republican, 40 percent as Democrat and 39 percent as unaffiliated.
Still, in recent memory, Mecklenburg has only broken Democratic hearts on Election Day. And former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign believes its strength in rural parts of the state, as well as with moderate suburban voters, will ensure he wins it. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted last month showed Mr. Trump leading by two points in North Carolina, although Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign continues to express optimism about her chances there.
Lorena Castillo-Ritz, the chair of the Mecklenburg Republican Party, said her team has prioritized knocking on the doors of unaffiliated voters, especially those who have tended to vote Republican in the past. Enthusiasm for Mr. Trump in the county is greater than ever, she said, especially when volunteer canvassers ask, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
“We’re not really counteracting,” Ms. Castillo-Ritz said. “We’re doing our own thing.”
Of the states Mr. Trump won in 2020, North Carolina was his narrowest victory, with a margin of 74,000 votes. That year, about 64,000 fewer votes were cast in Mecklenburg County than in Wake County, even though they have similar numbers of Democratic voters.
“I mean, if Mecklenburg pulls off three, four, five additional points in turnout, that could be the election,” said Blair Reeves, the executive director of Carolina Forward, a left-leaning policy organization.
Political strategists and academics said there are several explanations for why Mecklenburg County has consistently failed to deliver as many votes for Democrats as it could. For starters, the county’s leftward shift is relatively new — partly fueled by more young and highly educated voters, and more immigrant communities arriving there in recent years. Fifteen years ago, Charlotte’s mayor was Pat McCrory, a moderate Republican who was later elected governor in 2012.
And unlike in Georgia, where Atlanta is a blue behemoth, North Carolina’s Democrats are spread out between Charlotte, Greensboro and the Research Triangle, which includes Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.
“In Georgia, your ability to organize volunteers and advertise is all in one place,” said Eric Heberlig, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “In North Carolina, you have to do it in multiple places, which is harder and more expensive and more difficult to do it successfully.”
After Mr. Kromer took over the county party, he restructured it into 22 informal groups based on geography, such as the “South Charlotte Dems” and the “Davidson Dems,” the latter referring to a suburb of Charlotte. They essentially function as small parties within the larger Mecklenburg umbrella.
Each group has a leader, and Mr. Kromer gave them a simple job: Have monthly parties. “They were like, ‘That’s crazy, we should go do electoral work,’” Mr. Kromer said.
But he was serious. The ultimate goal was to build a year-round community and, Mr. Kromer hoped, make it easier to create a volunteer base for the presidential election.
Greg Snyder, a professor of religion at Davidson College who helped Mr. Kromer lead one of the groups, said that Republicans “have more of a longstanding social network through churches” that are beneficial in election seasons.
“If you’re more secular, more urban, you move down here from New York, you may not participate in that so much,” Dr. Snyder said. Referring to the groups that the county party created, he added, “Some of these communities, I tend to think of them as sort of a form of political church.”
Julia Buckner, the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party’s senior adviser for organizing, said the party used its newfound volunteer muscle — and tens of thousands of dollars — to flip an entire town board last November in Huntersville, a town of 63,000 where Republicans had held power for decades.
“We were trying to flip Huntersville because we were like, ‘If we could do this in Huntersville, we could do this in every part of the county,’” Ms. Buckner said.
The plan was to use that victory as part of a pitch to wealthy donors before the presidential election. It seems to have worked.
Hugh McColl, the former chief executive of Bank of America, who helped transform Charlotte into a budding southern metropolis in the 1990s by building the bank’s headquarters there, said in an interview that the Democrats’ success in Huntersville caught his attention and that of other donors.
“That was stunning, if you put it mildly,” Mr. McColl said.
He had never given money to the Democratic Party before, only to specific candidates. But this year, he has given $40,000 to the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party.
“The business of Charlotte is business. It has never been politics,” Mr. McColl said. “So the interest in politics has always been low relative to the rest of the state.”
But the current slate of MAGA-aligned Republican candidates in North Carolina, from Mr. Trump on down the ballot, is “bad for business,” Mr. McColl said.
He views the county party “like a pro team that finally got a good quarterback,” he said, adding in a reference to Mr. Kromer, “And Drew is our quarterback.”
Retribution has also been a big motivator for Mecklenburg Democrats still fuming over the betrayal of Tricia Cotham, the State House member who switched her party affiliation last year from Democrat to Republican to give Republicans a supermajority in the legislature. Her switch allowed conservatives to pass a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks.
Ms. Cotham, who like all state lawmakers is up for re-election, did not respond to a request for comment.
At a recent canvassing event, dozens of volunteers gathered at the Innovation Barn in Charlotte, including some who had never knocked on doors before for the party.
Among them was Megan Burton, 45, who was there with her 73-year-old mother, B.J. Butler, and her 10-year-old daughter, Eleanor. It was their first time canvassing.
“This is the first election that I’ve ever volunteered for,” Ms. Burton said. “I’m worried about the direction of the country, and about voter apathy.”
But at least that day, as crowds of first-time volunteers filled their purses and pockets with brochures, and as the party faithful roared at the thought of defeating Ms. Cotham, there was no hint of such apathy.
“I’m the example of people who haven’t been involved,” Ms. Burton said. “It’s remarkable to me that this has been here all this time.”
The post Can Charlotte, N.C., Deliver for Kamala Harris? appeared first on New York Times.
