By james art Former President Donald Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Greensboro on Tuesday night – his fourth event in North Carolina in two days.
With Election Day just two weeks away, Trump spent most of Monday in North Carolina, heading west to Swannanoa to see the devastation caused by Hurricane Helena before flying across the state for a rally in Greenville on the same a place where Vice President Kamala Harris held her own rally a week earlier. He finished the day by heading back west for an invitation-only meeting with religious leaders in Concord.
On Tuesday, Trump attended a roundtable in Miami aimed at reaching Latino voters in the morning before returning to the Tar Heel state for the rally at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.
As the presidential race enters its final stretch, the Trump and Harris campaigns are plotting how best to position the candidates, their rivals and their best surrogates in swing states. North Carolina, which has 16 electoral votes, is one of the battleground states where polls show an extremely close race.
Before Trump’s remarks Tuesday, NC GOP Chairman Jason Simmons told The News & Observer that Republican early voter turnout across the state “has been fantastic” so far.
The state Board of Elections reported that as of 4 p.m. Sunday – the fourth day of early voting – more than one million of North Carolina’s nearly 7.8 million registered voters had cast ballots.
Simmons said early voting data from those counties that report breakdowns of how many early voters are registered Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters show that Republicans “continue to outperform” this year.
The increase in GOP voters heading to the polls earlier, rather than on Election Day, comes as Trump and his campaign stressed the importance of voting when and where it’s most convenient for them.
Simmons said Republicans and unaffiliated voters “have been disillusioned with what they’ve seen over the last four years with this administration, with higher prices and public safety that’s just out of control.”
Other speakers at Tuesday’s rally included U.S. Sen. Ted Budd, U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx and Addison McDowell, who is running for Congress from North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District.
Campaign visits by candidates
Last week, after Harris visited Raleigh to pack supplies for western North Carolina and gathered supporters in Greenville, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, visited Durham and Winston-Salem.
In Durham, Walz was joined by former President Bill Clinton, who continued on a bus tour of eastern North Carolina that included stops in Wilmington, Fayetteville, Wilson, Greenville and Rocky Mount and ended with a block party in Raleigh.
Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, also campaigned and took questions from reporters in Wilmington last week.
During his tour of North Carolina on Monday, Trump urged supporters to get to the polls to “save America.”
Before Trump’s rally in Greensboro, Democrats held a press conference in which they denounced the Republican nominee as unfit for office and “too extreme for North Carolina.”
State Sen. Michael Garrett, D-Greensboro, said a second Trump presidency “would mean repealing the Affordable Care Act.”
“Trump is also determined to cut Social Security and take America back to a very dark past — back to failed economic policies that are leaving our seniors out in the cold,” Garrett said. “Our community deserves more than a second Trump presidency, and we stand ready to elect Vice President Harris and Governor Waltz.”
Mark Robinson was not present
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial nominee Trump has endorsed, was not among Tuesday’s speakers. At a March rally in Greensboro, where Robinson is from, Trump called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Robinson, who has trailed Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein in the polls for months, has not appeared with Trump since a mid-August rally in Asheboro, when Trump welcomed Robinson to the stage.
In the weeks since the governor’s race was upended by a CNN report that exposed alleged racist, sexually graphic and anti-Semitic comments made by Robinson on a pornographic website message board a decade ago, Trump has distanced himself from Robinson.
As he headed to North Carolina on Monday, Trump declined to answer a reporter’s question about whether he would urge his supporters to continue to support Robinson.
“I’m not familiar with the state of the race right now,” Trump said, according to Politico. “I haven’t seen him.”
Under the dome
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