Photographs by Mike Belleme

Gaston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. Just a few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South threw its weight behind Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the high-water mark is Barack Obama’s 37 percent vote share in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s last campaign stops as he worked to juice turnout. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority-GOP city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside city hall.

And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic field office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and revved up to hear from Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling—like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease—but it’s one of 29 field offices for Kamala Harris’s campaign across the state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by pouring energy into red counties, they can turn out a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters, and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.

[Read: The surreal experience of being a Republican at the DNC]

This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chair David Wilson Brown told me. He’d know: He ran two quixotic campaigns for U.S. House in the area. “We were thrilled when we found out that they wanted to base here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m thrilled that they’re paying attention here.”

North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.”

Volunteers making calls at the Gaston County Democratic Party headquarters, in Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost.

For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by running up the score in cities. That strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works—and it has sputtered in Charlotte, as Politico’s Michael Kruse writes—it offers a single, narrow path to victory. It also all but relinquishes many more local races, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can keep squeezing more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte—I wanted to squeeze the turnip as much as you can, but I’m just worried that that doesn’t get” enough votes, McCorkle told me.

So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.

(One telltale sign of young liberals’ arrival: luxury loft apartments in a refurbished Gastonia textile mill, the site of labor strife in 1929 that led to the deaths of a labor organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing the mill’s old and new denizens share is a likelihood of voting Democratic.)

Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a hipster deli and bottle shop I visited at the time. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal fight stemming from drag shows it hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama rally for Harris last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s owners, attributed that to cultural backlash.

“We created a place that people were able to come and just see that it’s not just white, cis humans living in this town,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris stepped up to run. When Biden won, when Trump got indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people gather at the store and they kind of party, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that they’re happy about.”

Back in 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and walking through downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I passed a cat café, an upscale head shop, and a hip coffee shop—exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar–themed artwork—that had all opened in the past year and a half. But nearly as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape changed to small farms, many with Trump yard signs.

Not everyone who is moving to these counties is liberal, though. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states drawn by economic opportunities, better weather, lower taxes, and, yes, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep-blue cities, so they land in countrypolitan counties. They fit in with existing residents who are neither wealthy country-club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.

Even so, some of these more conservative voters—generally white, college-educated, and better off—could swing Democrat, or at least that’s what the Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican residents of suburbs—sometimes offsetting the GOP’s advances among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is making a push for them too or, failing that, hoping they stay home and don’t vote for Trump.

“There are a wide range of voters in North Carolina who maybe aren’t dyed-in-the-wool liberals but do not want—and in many cases reject—the kind of extreme politics Donald Trump represents,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’s battleground-state director, told me.

The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial portion of the vote in presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary vote, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County, and 21.1 percent in Gaston County. If only a small portion of North Carolina Haley voters defect to Harris, it could swing the race.

A polling place in downtown Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia, is at the top of that list. A former member of the county GOP board in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, he moved farther out seeking affordable housing. His politics have moved too. He’d supported Trump in the past but backed Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he’s a leader of Republicans for Harris.

[Read: Trump’s fate rests on countrypolitan counties]

“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really just sends a resounding You are not welcome in the Republican Party,” he told me. “There’s a lot of Republican women who are appalled by the felonies, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion towards women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that “soccer dads” were edging away from Trump for the same reasons.

Some polls suggest a wider pattern of what Tucker has seen up close. A national survey released earlier this month by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to backing Trump, while 36 percent backed Harris.

Potential voters are not the same as actual voters, though, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, the Gaston County Democratic Party chair, told me he hoped Democrats might be able to hit 41 or 42 percent of the vote there this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can do that, she’ll probably be inaugurated on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after I visited, a Harris sign outside the field office was ripped down—for the second time. Gaston County is still a tough place to be a Democrat.

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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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