How Kamala Knocks Out Trump

Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 12. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images When CNN reported last week that Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor, had once called himself a “black NAZI” on a porn site, the political world came to one quick consensus: He was totally cooked in his race for governor. (Most of his staff promptly quit.) What was less obvious was how the news would budge the deadlocked presidential race there. At Kamala Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, and on the ground in Raleigh, Democratic operatives saw a clear opportunity to gain an edge in a state only one Democrat has won at the presidential level since Jimmy Carter. When Priorities USA, an influential Democratic super-PAC, finished running its latest private North Carolina forecast on Sunday, just days after the CNN report, it had Harris at 50.3 percent and Trump at 49.7. No one in Wilmington or Washington, let alone Charlotte, expects Harris to open up much of a lead in a state that often looks more burgundy than purple, but Harris’s team began making aggressive moves to flood North Carolinians with reminders of Robinson’s extremism, and...