GREENSBORO, N.C. — Riding a new wave of momentum following her U.S. debate performance, Vice President Kamala Harris is mobilizing her campaign with two rallies in North Carolina on Thursday, seeking to reclaim the key swing state and block one of former President Donald Trump’s key paths to victory.

Both campaigners see the state as playing a key role in November. Trump narrowly won in 2020, and no Democrat has won the presidential election here since Barack Obama in 2008. There is also a tough fight for the governor’s post, with Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein running against Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson.

“Voters across North Carolina are building a powerful coalition to elect Vice President Harris and defeat Donald Trump and his allies like Mark Robinson who are pushing an extreme Project 2025 agenda to take away our freedoms, raise costs for our families and roll back the Medicaid expansion we fought so hard for,” said Dory MacMillan, the Harris campaign’s North Carolina communications director. “This will be a close race — but we’ve built a campaign that is ready to win close races and reach voters across the political spectrum in our cities and in rural areas.”

According to a Quinnipiac University poll released this week, Harris leads Trump in North Carolina, 49% to 46%, which is within the poll’s margin of error. It’s still an extremely close race, but it’s an improvement for Democrats compared to President Joe Biden’s position in the spring. A Quinnipiac University poll in April showed Trump leading Biden, 48% to 46%, also within the margin of error.

A Harris campaign official said her team is entering a new, more aggressive phase in which staff will spend all day Wednesday reviewing videos of this week’s debate and selecting moments for new television and online ads.

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For months, the Biden team insisted that North Carolina was within reach, but Biden struggled to overtake Trump, in part because of his failure to energize younger voters. Now the Harris team reports it is seeing an unprecedented influx of volunteers in the state, especially young adults.

Since Harris was named the presumptive nominee, more than 20,000 new volunteers have signed up, another campaign official said. The official said nearly 2,000 North Carolinians signed up to volunteer for Tuesday night’s debate, nearly a quarter of them students at campus election parties.

“Younger voters traditionally are not as politically engaged as older voters,” says John Dinan, a political scientist at Wake Forest University. “The challenge is: How do you engage them?”

It’s unclear what boost Taylor Swift’s support will receive this week.

“It will certainly help Harris’ campaign,” Dinan said, but added that it is an open question to what extent Swift will actually make a difference.

In just over 12 hours after Swift posted her endorsement on Instagram, more than 337,000 people visited a custom URL in her post that directed people to a government site that helps with voter registration, according to the General Services Administration, which manages the site. Data on individual states was not available.

Anderson Clayton, the youngest chairman of a state Democratic Party, said Democrats have enrolled more than 2,500 students at Appalachian State University this year, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had 200 students enroll on Tuesday alone.

“Young people are not a monolithic voter,” Clayton, who was elected state chairman at age 25, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “We care about the issues that every other voter cares about.”

Health care was a big issue for Harris’ campaign, especially in North Carolina. Biden and Harris campaigned here together in March, touting the expansion of Medicaid in the state. Harris also promised to eliminate medical debt for millions of people, and policy experts say a program in North Carolina could serve as a guide for the federal government.

Other demographics could also be a deciding factor. One in five North Carolina residents is black, and the number of Latino voters is growing. Both are important voting groups for Democrats. The Harris campaign manager said they have opened 26 field offices across the state, and six more in rural communities were added last month.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is making its own efforts to recruit voters. Matt Mercer, a spokesman for state Republicans, argued that Republicans have had more votes than Democrats for years because of their better policies. He accused Democrats of playing catch-up and questioned how much work is being done in their new field offices.

“North Carolina’s Republican leadership has been tested and proven to have a superior ground strategy,” he said. “They were not abandoned in 2020 like the Democrats were.”