I realize everyone in North Carolina is focused on N.C. State beating Duke yesterday, but later this week, Vice President Kamala Harris will return to Charlotte for her fourth trip to the state this year and 12th since becoming vice president – another indication of how important the Tarheel State is to the Biden campaign, at least right now. Just a week ago, both Joe Biden and Harris attended an event and a fundraiser in Raleigh.

The Biden campaign adamantly insists that North Carolina is on their list of competitive swing states this cycle. I was skeptical when the year began, and I remain skeptical now. In 2020, when Biden was winning enough votes to flip formerly-red states like Arizona and Georgia, Biden fell almost 75,000 votes, or about 1.3 percentage points, short in North Carolina. It’s not just that recent polling by Morning Consult and Marist and Redfield & Wilton Strategies all show Trump with small leads in head-to-head polling with Biden. It’s that the numbers beyond the headline demonstrate how much skepticism Biden must overcome between now and November.

In the Morning Consult survey, 66 percent of respondents say the country is on the wrong track, 53 percent have an unfavorable opinion of President Biden, and 47 percent said they had heard news about Biden in the past week, and it was “mostly negative” – with just 37 percent saying they had heard “mostly positive” things about Biden in the preceding week.

In the Marist survey, 53 percent of North Carolina residents disapproved of the job Biden is doing in office, and 59 percent of North Carolina adults – “including 26 percent of Democrats, think that the question of Joe Biden’s mental fitness is a real concern when it comes to his ability to be president.”

In the Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey, just 39 percent approve of the job Biden is doing, 47 percent say their financial situation has worsened in the past year, and 63 percent believe the U.S. does not have control over its borders.

Note that to qualify for the presidential ballot in North Carolina, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to run on the We The People Party line, which requires his supporters to gather 13,865 signatures from registered and qualified voters by May 17 – a manageable threshold. So far polling indicates Kennedy isn’t well-known among likely North Carolina voters, but in the Marist poll of North Carolina, Trump receives 46 percent of the North Carolina electorate to 43 percent for Biden, and 11 percent support Kennedy. While it was reasonable to suspect that Kennedy might split the anti-incumbent vote, so far it appears Kennedy is either drawing equally from the two main party contenders or undermining Biden’s numbers a bit more.

The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall characterizes North Carolina as a “purple state that is testing the outer edges of MAGA-ism.” It is conceivable that between now and November, Trump and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson will prove to be too far to the right to appeal to the state, so far that dynamic hasn’t shown up in the numbers.

Add it up, and winning North Carolina remains a tall order for the Biden campaign.