GOLDSBORO, North Carolina — Early vote numbers in North Carolina show the electorate skewing older and whiter, compared to the state’s voter registration, a red flag for Democrats who need Black voters to turn out in heavy numbers if Kamala Harris is going to flip this state.

As of Wednesday, Black voters make up 18 percent of the electorate in early voting, and some Democratic operatives said they must bump that up to about 20 percent for Harris to be competitive statewide. In 2020, Black voters were 19 percent of the electorate, when Donald Trump narrowly won the state. And Democrats acknowledge that without a swing in their favor in the last days of early voting or on Election Day, it may not be good enough.

About 36,000 more African Americans had voted in-person by this point in 2020 than in 2024, and “that gap has to be closed among African Americans for Democrats to win,” said Thomas Mills, a Democratic strategist in the state.

Early voter data also shows women and suburban voters are overperforming so far, which Democrats point to as a positive sign for Harris. Voters under 40, who had initially lagged in early voting compared to their registration numbers, are also improving their performance in recent days.

But Democratic presidential candidates have faced challenges turning out Black voters since 2008, when Obama got more registered Black voters than registered white voters in the state to show up. And for Harris, it’s not just a turnout problem. There are also signs of erosion in her support in North Carolina among Black men, especially young Black men, according to public polling. Harris is expected to win a majority of African American voters in North Carolina, and nationally, but any slippage with this group would be a blow to the vice president.

“We have to intensify our focus and our message” to Black voters “between now and Election Day,” said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, who campaigned for Harris throughout eastern North Carolina, including his hometown of Goldsboro, last week. “The vice president understands that you can’t take any vote for granted, and obviously certain segments of society are not hearing from us enough.”

Regan added, “Or maybe they feel that the Republican Party is attempting to reach out to them, and they’re seeing a signal that maybe there’s more interest. Whatever the myth is, we’ve got to eliminate that. And the best way to eliminate that myth is action.”

Democrats on the ground here had hoped that action would, indeed, close the gap. Many likened the level of party organizing and activity in the state to 2008, giving them hope that there’s still time to put Harris over the top.

That means, as the days tick by, “the campaign needs bigger Election Day turnout in North Carolina than they got in 2020,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data consultant. “Because of the pandemic, because of the expectation of vote-mode switching, that’s not unrealistic.”

But Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College in North Carolina who is closely following the early vote totals, said, “considering that they’ve made major investments here, probably the most investments we’ve seen since Barack Obama in 2008,” then the early voter turnout among Black voters “has been a yellow flashing warning sign for Democrats.”

“The numbers are not portending an Obama-like Black turnout at this point,” he said.

Still others said that once Harris took over the top of the ticket, Democrats were still too slow to respond, not adding resources quickly enough to the more diverse Southern states.

“When it seemed like the map had widened to include Georgia and North Carolina, there wasn’t enough agility to be able to broaden out tactics and resources to launch the necessary elements in those states,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of Black PAC, which is running get-out-the-vote efforts in both states. “What we didn’t see was an immediate influx of resources into those states, therefore the [get-out-the-vote] programs weren’t able to begin scaling up until very late.”

“We completely expected Democratic voters to cast their ballots later than they did four years ago. We’re no longer in a pandemic, so voters want to participate in the excitement of Election Day,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “We feel good about the data we’re seeing coming out of North Carolina. We’re working hard and taking nothing for granted, but there’s nothing in the data that suggests we won’t hit our win number there.”

Republicans, however, remain confident the state will stay red. Paul Shumaker, a Republican consultant in North Carolina, said he sees “similar trend data that we saw in 2016 and 2020, which is that Black turnout is down.” He also argued that his own internal tracking shows Trump winning unaffiliated voters, the largest group of registrants in the state, but public polling has also shown Harris winning this group.

In a statement, the Trump campaign’s Black media director Janiyah Thomas said, in part: “Black voters know that President Trump has delivered once — and he’ll do it again.”

One layer of uncertainty in the state comes from its governor race, where Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s scandal-plagued campaign has almost guaranteed Attorney General Josh Stein’s victory in the state. Public polling shows Stein leading by double digits. But several Democrats said they did not believe Robinson’s unpopularity would necessarily trickle up to the top of the ticket.

Even so, Collective PAC founder Quentin James said he believes Robinson will be “a motivating factor for Black people” in order “to show he’s a horrible representation of our community.”

Robinson’s campaign shared a statement from the lieutenant governor that said, in part, “The Democrat Party of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Josh Stein has taken black voters for granted for decades, leaving black families in North Carolina with little to show for it.”

Public polling shows a mixed picture for the vice president in the closing days of the campaign. Trump, despite his history of making racist remarks, has polled better with Black and Latino voters than any other Republican presidential candidate in years. But Harris, especially in the last week, appears to be closing the gap with Black voters nationally. An ABC News poll released Sunday found Harris outperforming Biden’s 2020 margins with Black men by 14 points and by 8 points with Black voters overall.

But most Democrats in North Carolina insisted that it was less about Trump’s appeal to Black voters than their frustration that their vote didn’t matter. Once again, they said, it was more of a battle to keep these voters from staying at home altogether.

At a Bible study here last week, James Gailliard, a pastor and former Democratic state legislator, asked 150 of his congregants to film a TikTok video explaining why they voted early in North Carolina.

Maybe it’s “because educators vote,” he said. Or nurses — or “people who wear weaves.”

“Hey, listen,” he said, as the room erupted in laughter, “that might be good for some of the people we’re trying to reach.”

“What encourages me, why I still am not concerned, is because there are a ton of small little pockets of groups trying to do their part, and I’ve never seen that before,” Gailliard said in an interview in his church office. “We still have time on the clock.”