Democrats in North Carolina, buoyed by President Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings, are feeling newly optimistic about winning two deep-red seats in the U.S. House of Representatives as they angle to flip control of Congress for the final two years of the Republican’s presidency.
Trump traveled to North Carolina on Wednesday in hopes of reenergizing his supporters in those districts and statewide. He won the state in 2024 with 51% of the vote, but multiple recent polls have shown the Republican president is now deeply unpopular among North Carolina residents.
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An Elon University poll released this month found 31% of North Carolina voters approved of the job Trump has done since retaking the White House, and 54% disapproved. Another September poll from the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, similarly found 41% approval and 57% disapproval for Trump.
At Trump’s rally in Gastonia on Wednesday, his main goal was to boost Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who trails Democrat Roy Cooper in polls and fundraising.
Trump also gave speaking time to two conservative candidates for Congress who, in previous years, might’ve expected to cruise to victory but now find themselves in hard-fought elections. Laurie Buckhout is running in the state’s 1st Congressional District, covering northeastern North Carolina. Jennifer Balkcom is running for the 11th Congressional District, covering much of western North Carolina.
Each gave speeches hours before Trump took the stage, and he later invited them up alongside him to speak again. “So important that we get them in,” Trump said as he summoned them back up. “... We have to go vote for them.”
1st Congressional District
Buckhout lost her bid for this Trump-supporting seat in 2024 to Democratic Rep. Don Davis, who held on due to winning over some Trump voters. She’s running against Davis again for the 1st District seat this year.
She got major help from the Republican-led state legislature, which last year redrew the seat to make it even more conservative as part of national gerrymandering wars between Democrats and Republicans in multiple states. Voters in the redrawn district supported Trump by double digits in the 2024 election. But recent polls have still shown Davis as the favorite to win reelection in 2026—even though his home was drawn out of the new district.
In the state Senate and more recently in Congress, Davis has developed a reputation as a moderate willing to vote with Republicans at times.
"Eastern North Carolina knows Don Davis,” his campaign’s senior advisor Hannah Spengler said in a written statement. “They know he shows up, works with anyone who wants to get something done, and puts this district ahead of party politics.”
During her speeches at Wednesday’s Trump rally, Buckhout criticized Davis as a “do-nothing” politician, praised Trump and promised to deliver for the president’s agenda if elected.
“Eastern North Carolina has been left behind for 143 years by a system too weak to fight [for] it and too weak to keep it safe,” she said. “I will not leave you behind.”
National conservative groups hoping to flip the seat are spending millions of dollars to convince voters that Davis is a pawn of far-left politicians.
“Don Davis has been voting with the woke crowd,” proclaims one ad from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson.
GovTrack, a private website that assesses politicians’ voting history, ranks Davis as the most conservative Democrat in Congress—with a voting record that’s even to the right of some Republicans, according to its methodology.
CongressVoteTracker, another similar website, tracked a smaller sample of 40 high-profile bills and found Davis voted with the Democratic Party 62% of the time. By contrast, outgoing U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis—who many in the GOP, including Trump, view as insufficiently loyal to the party—voted with Republicans 97% of the time, according to the same metrics.
Spengler, Davis’ campaign advisor, said Davis is happy to run on his record. “Voters here split their tickets and make up their own minds, and right now they are choosing Don,” she wrote. “We are going to keep earning that trust every day through November.”
11th Congressional District
On the other side of the state, Balkcom is running as the GOP’s replacement for U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards in the western 11th Congressional District.
Edwards isn’t seeking reelection after his fellow members of Congress censured him following allegations of sexual harassment against young female staffers in his office. Edwards has disputed the allegations but bowed out of the race last month.
Local GOP party leaders picked Balkcom, a member of the state legislature from Henderson County, to replace Edwards on the ballot. She’s facing Jamie Ager. The Democratic nominee has raised millions of dollars from supporters who think he has a shot at winning the seat, despite voters in the district supporting Trump by double digits in 2024.
During her speech at Wednesday’s Trump rally, Balkcom praised Trump for supporting bans on transgender women playing girls’ sports, noting that she led the charge for the same policy in North Carolina several years ago.
Balkcom was the primary sponsor of that 2023 state law. “And guess what?” she said. “Gov. Cooper vetoed it, but we didn't stop. We overrode that veto, and today protecting women's sports is in law in North Carolina.”
Another major issue for western North Carolina is Hurricane Helene relief and the slow pace of federal funding for recovery.
Trump acknowledged Wednesday that the federal government is behind on providing that money, but he promised to consider doing more after the election. “I’m going to get that to you, Michael,” Trump said, addressing Whatley, to whom he gave a job overseeing federal recovery efforts in 2025. “Now, if Michael loses, I'm not sending it. Okay?”
Although Trump quickly said he was “only kidding” about stopping Helene aid to North Carolina if Whatley loses, multiple national news reports have shown his administration slowed down or denied disaster recovery funding requests from Democratic-led states since Trump retook office.
Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, was flabbergasted by Trump’s statement.
“There's no world in which Trump's comment helps Jennifer Balkcom,” he said in an interview from his home in the mountain town of Sylva. “I think folks in the West feel like Helene is very much still here. It's still very much a part of the district. And they're not in a joking mood about how relief should come.”
Shifting public attitudes
In both districts, polls show that local voters tend to lean Republican. And Trump won both with double-digit support in 2024.
But when presented with the specific candidates running for U.S. House this year, those same polls also show that the Democrats—Davis and Ager—come out ahead.
Public Policy Polling found this month that in the 11th district, voters lean 4 percentage points in favor of Republicans in general. But when asked to choose between Ager or Balkcom, Ager had a 3-point lead.
Ager is a hog and cattle farmer who has positioned himself as a moderate, writing in one recent social media post: “I have been a small business owner for over 25 years and know firsthand how small businesses are the backbone of our economy. I’m running for Congress as an independent voice for Western Carolina, focused on the issues that matter most to us, not partisan agendas.”
A separate poll from the Democratic-affiliated House Majority PAC, also this month, showed Davis ahead by an even larger margin.
The voters polled for that 1st district survey reported favoring Trump by 8 percentage points in 2024. But when asked if they’d generally support Democrats or Republicans in 2026, they reported leaning toward Democrats by 4 points. And when given the choice of Davis or Buckhout specifically, that increased to a 7-point lead for Davis.
But there’s still plenty of time for polling to change, particularly as national groups dump tens of millions of dollars into ads for the Senate race, the 1st District and the 11th District. Punchbowl News, a publication aimed at Washington insiders, reported Friday that Democrats and Republicans have already spent $30 million on the Davis-Buckhout race.
That's a staggering sum—particularly in a predominantly rural district, said Cooper, the WCU political scientist. “To see that kind of money just shows the national folks, on both sides of the aisle, feel like they can win this seat.”