Kamala Harris is hard to avoid in North Carolina these days. Turn on your TV and there she is (except when Donald Trump is on instead). On the radio: Kamala. Switch to Spotify if you want, but you’ll get Kamala ads there too. It’s enough to make you want to get out of the house and drive somewhere, but that’s only going to take you past a parade of Kamala billboards. You might even find yourself passing a Harris-Walz field office.

This makes sense. North Carolina is a key swing state in the election. Harris can win without it, but Trump probably cannot. In 2020, it gave Trump his narrowest victory, with a margin of fewer than 75,000 votes. Harris; Trump; their respective running mates, Tim Walz and J. D. Vance; and a host of surrogates have made many visits to the state and plan to keep coming right up until Election Day. Both campaigns are blanketing the airwaves.

But the similarities end there. The Trump campaign is running a lean operation in North Carolina, with far less physical presence: fewer field offices, fewer paid staffers, less footprint in general. I’ve driven on interstates across half the state in the past couple of weeks, and dead deer have outnumbered Trump billboards by roughly a 2-to-1 ratio. Simply put, the Trump campaign seems to barely exist here.

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What’s happening in North Carolina is a microcosm of the way the Harris and Trump campaigns are approaching the race nationally, as well as the results they’re producing. Harris is running a huge, centralized, multifaceted campaign with lots of staff. Trump is running a much leaner campaign, appearing to rely more on high-profile visits than organizational infrastructure, and farming out some get-out-the-vote operations, a central function of any political campaign, to independent groups. And in North Carolina, as in the nation overall, the result is a deadlock in the polls.

The gap between these two approaches stems from different resources, different campaigning philosophies, and different candidates. The Harris campaign has raised a staggering amount of money, allowing it to build a large operation around the country. The Trump campaign, by contrast, is scuffling for money; as of August, The New York Times recently reported, it had 11 paid staffers, compared with 200 four years ago and 600 for Harris this cycle. The Trump campaign appears to be betting that the candidate’s personal charisma and the popularity of his particular brand of grievance politics make up for it.

Trump’s campaign may well be making the right bet. “Trump’s turnout operation is his message,” Mac McCorkle, a public-policy professor at Duke University and retired Democratic strategist, told me. (I am an adjunct journalism instructor at Duke.) “Democrats confuse get-out-the-vote strength a little too much with We have 100 field offices. That’s good for Democrats, but that sometimes we fail to reflect that with a really strong, penetrating message, you don’t need as many field offices.”

Some of the difference is merely strategic. For example, although Harris and allied super PACs and other groups have posted billboards across the state trumpeting her support for entitlements and lower middle-class taxes, Trump and his supporters have evidently decided that billboards in North Carolina aren’t worth it. The Trump campaign has spent a much higher proportion of its budget on sending mailers to voters than Harris’s has.

Some other portion of the difference is more philosophical. At the risk of oversimplification, Democrats rely on a top-down organization, which involves lots of field offices and a great deal of national direction. Republicans tend to prefer a hub-and-spoke model, in which campaigns recruit captains who are then responsible for finding volunteers to work under them. Both of these models have succeeded in the past. In recent years, North Carolina Republicans have been more effective at turning out their voters than Democrats have. To see why getting every voter to the polls can matter, consider the 2020 race for chief justice of the state supreme court, in which Republican Paul Newby beat the incumbent Democrat, Cheri Beasley, by just 401 votes.

Harris has 29 field offices across the state, including in suburban counties that are traditionally strongly Republican but where Democrats see a chance to pick up votes. She has more than 300 staffers on the ground, and the campaign says that 40,000 people in North Carolina, most of them first-time volunteers, have signed up to help out since Harris began running, in July. That has drawn notice across the aisle. “What we’re seeing in North Carolina that we haven’t seen for a time, though, is a really well organized ground game by the Democrats,” Senator Thom Tillis told Semafor in September.

I’ve attended several recent Harris campaign events across the state this fall. There’s a formula to these things: They’re powered by young women with blue jeans, ponytails, and white HARRIS WALZ T-shirts, and typically feature some national Democratic figure. Last week, I watched the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, campaign for a promotion to first gentleman. His first stop of the day was at a house in southern Raleigh, where the owners had turned their garage into a de facto canvassing base plastered with signs. A table displayed swag—including psychedelic orange stickers reading Donald Trump is weird—that could be earned with two hours of volunteering.

“We want you to get out there and knock on doors and canvass, because we need you to do that so we can win North Carolina, so my wife … can be the next president,” Emhoff said. “You know what’s at stake right now. I don’t have to tell you, but you have to go out there and make the case and just get people to see what is so obvious, what is so clear, to cut through this Trumpian fog.”

The goal of this huge apparatus is to have sustained exposure to voters, in order to both persuade undecided ones and get Harris supporters who are irregular voters to actually cast ballots. “I think having a presence with that infrastructure of our staff and our offices and of our contact and other campaign events that we have—it makes a difference over time,” Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground-state director, told me. “It opens doors, opens minds, to hearing persuasive messages.”

That is the theory, at least. Data so far suggest that Democratic turnout is lagging. North Carolina reports data based on race and partisan registration, not results, so it’s not a perfect proxy for votes, but turnout among Black voters, a key Democratic constituency in the state, is down somewhat. The Harris campaign’s task is to close that gap before or on Election Day.

What about on the Republican side? It’s harder to say. Everything about Trump’s campaign is more distributed: His voters are less concentrated in densely populated areas, and the GOP’s relational organizing style lends itself less to visibility. Even so, I’ve been struck by how invisible the Trump campaign is in North Carolina. Several Democrats told me they were also puzzled about what field operations Republicans were running. But they take little comfort in that, fearing a replay of 2016, when Hillary Clinton greatly outspent Trump and lost the general election.

Nationally, Republicans have expressed concerns about whether the Trump ground game is ready for the election. His campaign has handed much of the turnout operation over to outside groups, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and, more recently, Elon Musk’s America PAC. Ron DeSantis tried something similar in the GOP primary and failed spectacularly, but the temptation to use outside groups with fewer fundraising limits is strong. Reuters reports that Musk’s group has struggled to meet its targets, and The Guardian has revealed that paid canvassers might be falsifying voter contacts.

To get a better grasp of the Trump campaign’s operation in North Carolina, I reached out to spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee but received no answer. I also got no answer from Turning Point USA. I emailed a North Carolina–specific address for Musk’s America PAC and received only an automated email inviting me to apply for a paid-canvasser position. Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the North Carolina GOP, also did not reply to me, but he told The Assembly, “There’s only one ground game this year that’s already been tested—and that’s the Trump campaign in the primary.”

Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, told me he thought the discrepancy I was witnessing was a result of more efficient targeting. He noted that he and several other longtime GOP voters he knows were seeing their mailboxes filled with attacks on a Republican candidate for the state supreme court—a sign of wasteful spending.

“I’m not gonna go into too much detail on this, because this is where I think Democrats have missed the mark, and I don’t want to help try to start educating them on how to quit missing the mark,” he said. “Other Republican voting efforts are more data driven and more strategic in who they talk to and how they talk to them. Democrats have not seemed to have dialed in on that.”

What Trump is doing is holding a lot of rallies in the state. These events are not cheap, but they are cheaper than running a large ground game, and they are powerful motivators for Trump voters. At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, this month, I spoke with Dawn Metts, who lives some 45 minutes away, in Kinston. A friend got tickets to the rally and then invited her. “I said, ‘Heck yeah, we’re there, baby!’” she told me. She’d camped out overnight to make sure she got a good spot in the arena. Metts was feeling optimistic about Trump’s chances.

“As long as he wins, I feel good about it,” she said. “I think he’s gonna win.”

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

Turnout, like football, is a game of inches. Both campaigns’ plans for North Carolina were disrupted in late September, when Hurricane Helene ravaged the western part of the state. Devastation from the storm upended preparations by election officials and partisan operatives, but, more important, meant that people who might otherwise have been focused on politics were focused on finding food, water, and a safe place to sleep.

The area affected by the storm is predominantly Republican; a quarter of Trump’s 2020 vote in North Carolina came from counties declared federal disaster areas. But Helene also hit Buncombe County, home to the liberal enclave of Asheville, hard, and Democrats there expressed concerns about their ability to turn out votes, according to the political outlet NOTUS.

Focusing on the minutiae of field offices or storm effects can be a distraction. Turnout can swing only a few votes here and a few votes there. Yet the 2024 election appears to be close enough that any of these factors could decide who wins North Carolina and, with it, the White House.

The revelation that North Korean troops have been gathering in Russia, ostensibly to assist President Vladimir Putin in his brutal invasion of Ukraine, has stoked Western fears of autocratic states banding together to undermine the interests of democracies. There is an authoritarian coalition, but it’s rickety—and it depends on China’s tolerance for chaos.

The war in Ukraine has been a showcase for cooperation among four states—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—that share an antipathy toward the United States and the international order it represents. Since invading its neighbor in 2022, Russia has sourced drones and missiles from Iran. In October, Washington sanctioned Chinese companies for working with Russian firms to produce drones. According to U.S. officials, China has also been supplying Russia with vital components that help sustain its war machine. And now North Korean troops have come to Russia, where, Ukrainian officials believe, they are preparing to join the invading forces. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that if the troops did participate in the war, it would be a “very, very serious issue” with potential implications in both Europe and Asia.

Yet this cooperation masks divisions among the world’s major autocracies. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran don’t necessarily agree on how to achieve their shared goal of countering American domination. Putin has chosen an expansionist war. North Korea and Iran—impoverished, isolated from the West, and zealously anti-American—have little to lose, and something material to gain, from assisting Russia. But China’s calculus is more complicated, because its desire to change the current world order is tempered by its reliance upon that very same order. The Chinese economy remains too dependent on the United States and its partners to risk being heavily sanctioned for shipping arms to Putin.

Constrained by these competing interests, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has taken a generally cautious approach to his global ambitions. He apparently aims to preserve a measure of global stability to protect the Chinese economy while he steadily expands China’s power. At the same time, however, he has deepened his relationships with Russia and Iran, even as their leaders foment chaos in Europe and the Middle East.

Washington is pressing Beijing to intervene and curb North Korea’s cooperation with Russia, but Xi has not shown much interest in leveraging his influence to rein in his autocratic friends. He met with Putin just the day before the Biden administration revealed the presence of North Korean troops in Russia. What passed between the two isn’t known, but the troops remained.

A case can be made that China is not only allowing but indirectly bankrolling all this disruption. The U.S. has sanctioned Russia, Iran, and North Korea, leading all three countries to become heavily dependent on China. Trade between China and Russia reached a record $240 billion last year. Russian business is even turning to the Chinese currency, the yuan, to replace the U.S. dollar. China buys nearly all of Iran’s oil exports, and accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade. These three countries might have pursued their wars, nuclear programs, and terror campaigns without economic ties to China. But Beijing’s support is undoubtedly helping, and Xi is apparently willing to accept the result.

[Read: China might be the Ukraine war’s big winner]

The destabilizing activities of other autocracies might seem like a win for China, because they effectively drain the West’s resources and undercut its standing in the world. But they are also risky, because the turmoil they create could backfire on China. For instance, a wider war in the Middle East could puncture energy markets and hurt China’s economy. Xi isn’t in a diplomatic or military position in the Middle East to contain the damage. Meanwhile, the North Korean deployment to Russia is threatening to escalate the war in Ukraine: South Korea’s president has warned that Seoul may respond by supplying Ukraine with offensive weapons. China’s leadership has little to gain from concentrating the efforts of America’s European and Asian allies against Russia. In the event that the war widens, American and European leaders could step up sanctions on China to get it to curtail its support for Moscow.

The conundrum of China’s foreign policy is that it seeks at once to completely upend the international order in the long term and to preserve it in the short term. Xi’s solution to this problem is to reduce China’s reliance on the United States and the global system it dominates in the medium term. He is pursuing “self-sufficiency” and encouraging tighter ties of trade and investment with the global South to wean the Chinese economy off Western technology and consumer markets. Then China would have greater freedom to support autocracies such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea in their destabilizing activities.

But that’s the future. For now, Xi is willing to tolerate a world in flames, in the hope that China won’t get burned. By feeding tensions with the West, he stands to damage China’s economy and complicate its geopolitical ambitions. What will the Chinese leader do if this gamble doesn’t go his way? With friends like Xi’s, he may not need enemies.

US flies long-range bomber with South Korea and Japan in response to North Korean missile test