Pessimism was growing for Kamala Harris’s pathway to the White House based on early voting totals across the US on Tuesday night.
Trump took quick leads in the Sun Belt states of North Carolina and Georgia, though observers haven’t called the election in either state.
In North Carolina, Trump lead Harris 50.7 percent to 47.9 percent, with 84 percent of expected votes in, while Trump had a narrower 0.6 lead over Harris in Georgia after 50 percent of expected votes had been cast, according to NBC News.
Harris, as expected, was ahead in more urban North Carolina counties containing cities like Raleigh and Charlotte, while Trump dominated much of the rest of the state’s more rural areas.
If those trends hold, Harris will likely needing to sweep the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to win.
Meanwhile, The New York Times election needle projects there’s a 79 percent of a Trump victory based on current data.
The campaign hasn’t lost faith however.
It is eyeing what is says are positive factors like enthusiasm in Michigan and North Carolina university towns and above-average support in suburban Indiana and Georgia, in some cases outpacing Biden’s 2020 results in the latter state.
The campaign also tells The Independent that Trump’s wide support in rural Georgia isn’t exceeding what Harris already expected to face, and that late-arriving mail ballots could bump the vice president’s numbers up in North Carolina.
Elsewhere, Democratic strategist James Carville said he was disheartened at the strength of some Trump performances in suburban areas such as Loudon County, Virginia.
“Loudoun County, Virginia’s not great,” Carville said on Amazon’s election night show. “Think Dulles Airport, suburban Washington — [I] think [Joe Biden] was like 62% in 2020. I’m seeing 57, 58 right now. There are troubling signs out there, but we got a big vote coming out of Philadelphia. Let’s just wait a second. Let’s see what happens in North Carolina and Georgia; but I would be less than honest if I didn’t say the early indications here are not sterling.”
But Carville said he was more optimistic about potential votes for Harris in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
“Talking about a 50,000-100,000 increase in Democratic votes in Philadelphia,” he added, “so that should absolve something. That should absolve a lot; and some of the stuff I see out of Georgia is, obviously, more encouraging than Florida. Anything is more encouraging than that.”
In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a closely watched swing district, Harris led Trump 53.3 to 45.3 percent with 24.7 percent of precincts reporting, according to unofficial tallies from the local board of elections.
Overall, Trump leads Harris 50.9 percent to 48.1 in the state, according to the Associated Press, with 61 percent of votes counted.
