KNIGHTDALE, North Carolina — Kamala Harris is counting on suburban voters to do what they’ve done since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016: reject him.

It may be the single most important piece of her electoral math. While Donald Trump has made inroads with Black and Latino men, polls in the late stage of the election show the suburbs could still power her to victory. The latest Wall Street Journal poll found Harris leading among suburban voters by 7 percentage points, while a Reuters/Ipsos analysis showed the vice president winning suburban households by 6 points.

If either of those numbers hold, they would likely be enough to offset Harris’ erosion with Black, Latino and young men.

And the suburbs are where Harris is making her stand. The suburbs, especially those surrounding Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, are growing and diversifying, representing the crosscurrents of an apparent political realignment in the Trump era — college-educated voters of both genders moving hard toward Democrats while Republicans gain ground with blue-collar voters in small towns. Democrats’ newfound appeal in suburban communities undergirded their victories in 2018 and 2020. And this year, they have the advantage of outrage over the overturning of Roe.

“College-educated voters were reliably Republican for decades, but now they’re turning away from Trump, from his toxicity,” said Jim Messina, who led Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, calling it a “seismic shift” in American politics.

“It started in 2018, but then Dobbs put a flame to the gas,” he added.

That’s why a dozen volunteers picked up stacks of pro-Harris literature and stickers at a park pavilion here last week, as kids swung from monkey bars nearby. They’re on a mission to not only deliver the state for Harris, but also break the Republicans’ veto-proof majority in the state legislature. Both strategies rely heavily on Democratic strength in suburban communities.

“I was not involved in politics until Donald Trump got in office,” said Mindy Nelson, who joined the Liberal Ladies of Southern Wake County, which includes 1,400 women, when she moved to the area in 2018 from Maryland.

Nelson, who was picking up canvassing material last week, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message, “Vote like your granddaughter’s rights depend on it,” said she and many of her friends are most concerned about abortion rights, and she is concerned about her 2-year-old granddaughter’s rights.

“I am really afraid for the next generation,” she said.

In 2020, Biden won the suburbs by about 2 percentage points, according to exit polls, after Hillary Clinton lost them in 2016. And even before Harris took over the ticket from Biden, Democrats were obsessed with expanding their numbers. In May, six weeks after Nikki Haley dropped out of the GOP primary, Biden’s staffers studied the former South Carolina governor’s performance in the Pennsylvania primary, when she’d already dropped out of the race but still racked up 20 to 25 percent support in the upscale collar counties around Philadelphia. Within days, they dropped digital ads targeting those voters.

And when Harris joined Cheney, a one time conservative darling, for a series of town halls in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, earlier this month, the campaign strategically placed the events in the heart of suburban communities. More than 100 Republican former elected officials and national security experts joined Harris at a rally in Pennsylvania, where Harris pledged: “No matter your party, no matter who you voted for last time, there is a place for you in this campaign.”

“Not only do you have Democratic suburban women who are turning out in higher numbers, but there’s also moderate, sane women who the Republican Party has moved away from — just look at where Nikki Haley did well,” said Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat who represents suburban Detroit. “Harris is making the case to those women that you have a place in this future.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. But Trump has done less in recent months to appeal explicitly to suburban voters. For example, Haley, who won significant support in suburban counties during her GOP primary run, has not appeared on the campaign trail for Trump, even though her campaign has provided the Trump campaign with potential dates she’d be available, The Associated Press reported this week.

Instead, Trump’s efforts to juice his base could detract from his effort in the suburbs, especially among women.

“The Trump campaign is going overboard to win over and mobilize men, exacerbating the divide, and pushing women in the other direction,” said a Republican operative in Michigan, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “But I think the socioeconomic and education realignment of the parties require Harris to do even better in the suburbs because of that.”

Suburbanites play an arguably decisive role in presidential wins. In 2016, Clinton narrowly won Oakland County, Michigan, which McMorrow now represents, with just over 51 percent of the vote. Then Biden blew out that advantage in 2020 by winning with over 56 percent of the vote and building a 14-point gap over Trump there. In 2016, Clinton won Bucks County, Pennsylvania, by less than one percentage point, but Biden won it by nearly a 5-point margin in 2020. Biden ultimately won both states.

“I don’t think those disaffected Republicans in the suburbs, specifically talking about Bucks County, are now so unsatisfied with Biden and Kamala that they’re going to vote Trump. That’s just not going to happen,” said Mike Conallen, former chief of staff to Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican who represents suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County. “If anything, they’re going further away from Trump because of Jan. 6, because of ‘Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs,’ because of Roe v. Wade.”

In Wisconsin, Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair, predicted that when Democrats “look back at a win … part of the story will be the explosion of early voting in the WOW counties,” the three historically Republican-leaning counties that surround Milwaukee and that he said “might include a lot of voters who Republicans think are voting for Trump but are actually voting for Harris.”

“No part of Wisconsin has swung harder and more quickly than Milwaukee’s once bright-red suburbs,” Wikler said.

Still, Harris’ gamble on suburbanites includes a number of risks. Some Democrats fear banking on independents and soft Republicans who live outside America’s cities is a more dangerous bet than focusing exclusively on turning out base, lower propensity Democratic voters. Progressives, too, have privately grumbled about the high-profile attention Harris has given to Cheney and other Republican backers. Still others fret about the long-term implications of the party forging an alliance that’s based, at least in part, on antipathy toward Trump.

But the Harris campaign and her Democratic allies believe another factor will weigh even more heavily on the suburbs — abortion. And “since the fall of Roe v. Wade, women are coming out of the woodwork,” said Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), who flipped a suburban Las Vegas district in 2018.

In North Carolina, Sara Oliver is one of those women, activated in a post-Roe world. Oliver, director of Duke University’s climate and sustainability engineering master’s program, formed a pro-abortion rights fundraising group with a group of other working moms, who met through Saturday morning walks during the coronavirus pandemic.

“When Roe v. Wade got overturned, we were all like, ‘Holy shit.’ We can’t just talk anymore, we’ve got to figure out what to do,” said Oliver, who noted that the four women now share eight kids under 11 among them. “Who has time for it? None of us. But we don’t have time not to care.”

Out of those walks — “any problem can be solved by angry women on a power walk,” Oliver joked — the women formed Never And Now NC, which raised more than $150,000 for state legislative candidates in 2022, hoping to break the Republicans’ supermajority. They’ve endorsed four state Senate candidates in 2024, raising another $150,000 and counting for them.

Oliver said even though they’re cognizant their efforts might help the top of the ticket, “this isn’t about Trump.” It’s about Dobbs, she said, and how “our daughters are going to have less rights than our grandmothers.”

“That’s what pisses me off and it is not okay,” Oliver said.

Oliver found one of those like-minded voters as she canvassed a wooded neighborhood in Durham County.

“My mom would tell me how women used to not be able to have credit cards, how her friends died having abortions before it was legal, and then to have it go backwards was such a shock. I mean, I just remember that day feeling sick,” said Elizabeth Shamblin, a North Carolina State University professor, who greeted Oliver on her doorstep. She hoped that by “younger people being more attuned to” losing their abortion rights, it’ll help Harris turn the state blue.

One of Shamblin’s sons, displaced by Hurricane Helene and hovering briefly behind her, hadn’t yet voted. “I took my other son yesterday,” she said, “but I’ll make sure he early votes, too.”

Holly Otterbein and Megan Messerly contributed to this report.