What Trump and Harris' latest stops show about the 2024 race

• Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will mostly close out the 2024 race in Pennsylvania.
• But it is Trump's campaign team that is making a late push to expand its path to victory.
• Both sides also play for North Carolina.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are saying much about their closing strategies by using the most valuable remaining resource in the 2024 campaign: their time.

The two leading candidates have or will visit each of the seven swing states in the final days of the campaign. Harris spent Friday in Wisconsin, Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina and will travel across Michigan today. Trump spent Friday in Michigan and Wisconsin, Saturday in North Carolina and will be in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia today. Both hopefuls spent Thursday in Nevada and Arizona.

Trump takes the most obvious approach. He spent part of Friday in New Mexico and Saturday in Virginia, where neither place has voted for a Republican for president in two decades. His campaign even included a last-minute rally in New Hampshire with Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance. No major election watcher considers any of these three states to be a “mistake.”

Saturday showed that there could still be an upset in this chaotic race, even if polls and pundits say otherwise.

Harris could potentially expand her card without actually trying. The widely respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll found her leading among likely Iowa voters by three percentage points. Iowa, once a swing state, has swung heavily toward Republicans in recent elections, and no one thought Trump was in danger of losing a state he won easily in 2016 and 2020. Another poll showed Trump leading the state, but the biggest finding is Trump's struggles with older women. If this continues elsewhere in the Midwest, he's in serious trouble.

The state that stands out the most in the schedule.

Not surprisingly, Trump and Harris are focusing most of their efforts on Pennsylvania, the key swing state.

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Harris would win the race by holding the “Blue Wall” in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as the so-called Blue Dot, Nebraska's 2nd congressional district. In this scenario, Trump could defeat the remaining four swing states and still fall short.

However, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Harris would be in a quandary. If Harris won Michigan and Wisconsin, she would still have to add Georgia or North Carolina to her column. Even winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona wouldn't be enough to get her into the White House.

For this reason, Trump's decision to spend an extended period of time in North Carolina is of great importance. He is expected to spend the second most time in the state in the final days of the campaign, trailing only Pennsylvania. Harris held a rally in Charlotte on Saturday before flying to New York to make a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

The major poll aggregators show Trump leading in the Tar Heel State by just over a percentage point. Although President Obama has been the only Democratic presidential candidate to hold the state since 2000, Trump narrowly defeated President Biden there four years ago.

Some of Harris' advisers mocked Trump's decision.

“Donald Trump is worried about losing North Carolina,” Harris spokesman Ammar Moussa wrote on X under two siren emojis.

Doug Sosnik, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton and a North Carolina native, doesn't see Harris' path there.

“It's a state that people like me would have said 10 years ago would be a Democratic state like Virginia today, but it's not,” Sosnik said.

North Carolina is “not a level playing field” for Democrats, Sosnik said, pointing to Democrats’ struggles there, with the exception of Obama.

“It's highly competitive. It's worth fighting for. If she has the resources, she should persevere and maybe even win,” Sosnik said.

Trump's campaign team responded that it was actually Harris who was worried.

“President Trump is leading in every battleground state and is going on the offensive in historically Democratic states like New Mexico and Virginia,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Business Insider. “In the meantime, Kamala Harris remains on defense, deploying more resources to get out the vote in black communities and sending Bill Clinton to New Hampshire.”

Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College, said one of the wild cards for North Carolina this cycle is the large number of people who moved to the state after 2020.

According to the Census Bureau, only two other states, Florida and Texas, gained more people in 2023. Since 2020, an average of about 99,000 people have moved to North Carolina from other states each year, according to the Office of State Management and Budget.

Trump must also grapple with the fact that some of his strongest counties were devastated by Hurricane Helene, leaving officials scrambling to move polling locations.

“If North Carolina is close, if it looks like Harris is ahead by a hair, I think a lot of the votes in western North Carolina will be scrutinized within an inch of their lives,” Roberts said, adding , she is not convinced that every vote will be cast. The affected areas will have arrived on time.