Around 8 p.m. on Friday — when there was no discernible wind, no rain, no lightning, nothing like that — all the lights in my house in Chapel Hill, N.C., died, and I looked outside to see my entire neighborhood in darkness.
I immediately suspected the election.
That’s not because I’m paranoid. (Well, maybe a bit.) It’s because of all the twists, turns and tension in North Carolina over the months leading up to Nov. 5. Perhaps more than any other battleground state, North Carolina has been a lode of MAGA extremism, a hothouse for conspiracy theories and a font of lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of ballots and auguring more and worse protests on or after Election Day. Some prank or vandalism involving the power grid hardly seemed out of the question.
Early Saturday the electricity returned; an email from the power company cited “equipment failure.” I wasn’t calmed. How could I be among the nonstop television commercials, the countless yard signs, the door knocking, the cold calling and the incessant, traffic-snarling visits from the candidates themselves? Here in North Carolina, with its juicy trove of 16 Electoral College votes, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump haven’t so much sweet-talked as stalked us. She dropped in on Saturday, as did he — twice. He came back on Sunday. And again on Monday, on the off chance we’d forgotten him.
North Carolina is all the 2024 dynamics distilled, every national plotline in Day-Glo miniature. It’s mood ring and mirror, and it will answer the biggest, most consequential questions about what’s happening in the electorate. My confident prediction: If Harris wins here, she wins the whole shebang, because it means that she benefited from efforts and currents with huge relevance to the other six major battleground states. As I map it, her path to 270 or more Electoral College votes runs through this patch of purple.
No wonder everyone here is on edge.
“I’ve never seen people as anxious,” former Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who spent more than a quarter century in the House, told me. He said that while North Carolinians are used to swing-state intensity, “this time has been different. This is no-holds-barred.”
By at least one measure, North Carolina represents Harris’s best opportunity to pick up a state that President Biden lost in 2020, because his defeat here — by only about 1.3 percentage points — was his most narrow, and the state’s brisk population growth since then has been concentrated in metropolitan areas that favor Democrats and has included many college-educated voters and people of color, two groups that skew Democratic.