What do polls, early votes reveal about election in North Carolina, a key swing state?

The path to the White House cuts straight through North Carolina — one of several all-important swing states.

The state, with its 16 electoral votes, will likely be instrumental in delivering the presidency to Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.

With just one week until Election Day, here is what recent polls and early voting data reveal about the state of the race in the Tar Heel State.

What polls show

According to a polling average compiled by FiveThirtyEight — an election analysis site — Harris and Trump are just about dead-even with one another, with Trump leading by just 1% as of Oct. 29.

Individual polls conducted in October paint a similar picture, with most of them giving either Trump or Harris an extremely narrow lead.

For example, a Redfield and Wilton Strategies poll conducted between Oct. 25 and 27 found the former president leading Harris 48% to 46%. The poll sampled 916 likely voters and has a margin of error of 3.24 percentage points.

Similarly, a SurveyUSA poll — conducted a few days earlier with a sample of 1,050 adults — found the candidates were tied at 47%.

Trump led Harris by two points — 50% to 48% — in an Emerson College poll conducted between Oct. 21 and 22. The survey sampled 950 likely voters and has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, putting Trump’s lead within that margin.

Political scientists in the state agreed with the findings of these recent surveys.

“The polls show the race as very close and there’s no reason to think otherwise,” Steven Greene, a professor of political science at North Carolina State University, told McClatchy News in an email.

Echoing this sentiment, Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at UNC Chapel Hill, told McClatchy News, “I have no reason to think either candidate has an advantage at this point, it could go either way.”

Asher Hildebrand, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, noted that all of the polls conducted in October have either Trump or Harris leading by a maximum of three points, meaning it is extraordinarily close.

“Harris’s entry into the race has turned the state into a true toss-up that could swing either way,” Hildebrand said.

What early voting data shows

As of Oct. 29, about 3.2 million North Carolina voters — or about 40% of all registered voters in the state — have cast their ballots for the upcoming election, according to the state’s board of elections.

The vast majority of these votes have been submitted through early in-person voting, which has thus far surpassed 2020 figures by 2.1 percentage points.

So far, Republicans have outpaced Democrats in casting early votes by a margin of about one percentage point, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

This phenomenon — which goes against the historical trend of Democrats dominating the early vote — could be a result of the Republican effort to balance the playing field, Taylor said.

For example, Trump has encouraged his supporters to vote early this year in contrast to 2020, when he was highly critical of the practice, according to Politico.

“This doesn’t mean that Democrats should be ringing alarm bells—but it does leave less margin for error in their turnout operation for the remainder of early voting and on Election Day,” Hildebrand said.

However, Democrats also have reason to be hopeful based on North Carolina’s early vote, Taylor said.

Women, who tend to lean Democratic, have outpaced men 51.9% to 41.8%, according to the Election Lab.

This gap could prove advantageous for Harris, Taylor said.

But, experts also expressed caution about reading into early voting data or using it to predict the final outcome.

“We should be careful about over-interpreting the early voting results in any election—and even more careful about comparing them to 2020, which was unique not just because of the pandemic but because Trump and the Republican Party actively discouraged their voters from voting early,” Hildebrand said.

“I just don’t put a lot of stock in early voting numbers,” Greene said.

Ultimately, the race is on a razor’s edge and will come down to turnout, he said.