APEX, N.C. — On the floor of the Republican National Convention last month, an anguished attendee cornered Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions with an urgent message.

“We need help in North Carolina,” the attendee told Sessions, a top Donald Trump ally. “We can get no information about anything. We don’t know who to go to. … We’ve got to get some boots on the ground, we really do. We have nothing.”


Now, 80 days before the election, Trump’s team is trying to regain a foothold in this must-win state, but the Republican nominee’s challenge here is only growing.

Interviews with more than a dozen North Carolina operatives and lawmakers reveal that Trump has failed to consolidate the Republican base in North Carolina. Worse, according to these sources, he is particularly driving away female and independent voters who are crucial in Republican-leaning suburbs, such as Apex, outside of Raleigh.

Meanwhile, they say, Hillary Clinton’s extensive field organization and saturation of the airwaves make it even harder for Trump’s bare-bones, late-starting operation to catch up despite a recent reorganization of his team here.

At this point, said veteran Republican strategist Carter Wrenn, Trump’s best hope for winning North Carolina rests on the possibility of some major game-changing external event, rather than on his campaign’s ability to produce a win. That’s a risky dynamic for Trump, whose road to the White House would almost certainly have to run through North Carolina, given his underwater polling in other key battleground states.

Asked what Trump’s path to victory in North Carolina looks like, Wrenn responded, “I’m not sure I know.”

“There’s no doubt he could win North Carolina,” Wrenn continued. “Whether he can control that or not, I don’t know. Whether there’s things he can do to turn things around, that’s harder to say. More likely, there are external events that neither campaign can control: a terrorist attack, a turndown in the economy, a WikiLeak. … If Hillary steps on her own foot, that could change it, but she hasn’t done that the last two months. She seems pretty cautious.”

Recent polls show Trump lagging Clinton by anywhere from 1 to 9 percentage points. His team is just now getting organized in a more substantive way on the ground, after a previous longtime state director, Earl Phillip, was removed from the position earlier this month. Phillip is now the subject of a lawsuit after allegedly pulling a gun on another staffer.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Four years ago, Mitt Romney won North Carolina — one of the few battlegrounds he seized back from Barack Obama, who captured the state in 2008 — and Republicans were optimistic that they could keep the state red this cycle.

“This time last year, I was excited about North Carolina electing a Republican president, along with a Republican Senate and Congress,” said Art Pope, a major GOP donor and activist who backed Scott Walker and then Marco Rubio in the primary.

But now, said Pope, who does not currently support Trump or Clinton, he’s not at all confident the GOP will carry the state.

“If we had had a traditional Republican candidate who was strong on improving the economy, on national defense issues, they would have had a much easier chance carrying North Carolina,” he said. “In North Carolina, there’s going to be a lot of people voting for the lesser of two evils. I don’t know who loses that contest.”

While polls show that both Clinton and Trump have high unfavorable ratings here, as they do nationally, Trump’s are generally higher, and he has some built-in demographic challenges. North Carolina, where the Research Triangle is based, has a booming population of college-educated voters, as well as many Latin American and African-American voters — all constituencies with which Trump has struggled.

And even in a Southern state that has gone Republican in eight of the past nine elections, he hasn’t locked down his base; that’s especially true in the suburbs in and around heavily populated Wake County, home to Raleigh, and Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte. Wake and Mecklenburg are, overall, reliably Democratic, but they also represent the two biggest vote shares in the state, and a Republican cannot get blown out in those two places.

There’s a real risk of that happening if Trump can’t energize Republicans who live in those areas.

Trump lost Wake County by big margins in the primary, though he won the state, and in one clear indication of how toxic he still is among independents and some Republicans in the region, North Carolina House Speaker Pro Tem Paul Stam, who represents Apex, refused repeatedly to say whether he was supporting Trump.

“I decline to answer,” he said, when asked whether he was endorsing the nominee, even as he was critical of Clinton and highlighted his support for Republican Sen. Richard Burr and Gov. Pat McCrory.

Former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, who co-chaired John Kasich’s campaign in the state during the primary and also lives in the Raleigh area, has already ruled out voting for Trump.

“I will go to my grave opposed to him,” pledged Orr, who has voted Republican in every presidential election since he could vote, casting his first ballot for Richard Nixon in 1968. This time around, he’s not ruling out supporting Clinton.

Further south, in the Charlotte area, Trump is also having problems with people who would ordinarily be inclined to support the GOP nominee. Even people who frequent Trump National Golf Club, located in a moneyed, verdant neighborhood in conservative Iredell County, have reservations.

“I would like him to tone it down,” said Helene Goulet, 73, who had just finished playing in a golf tournament there on a hilly course overlooking a lake. “I believe he’s very smart; I was hoping he could make it, shake Washington up, but I’m very concerned he can’t control his mouth.”

State Sen. Jeff Tarte, a Republican who represents Cornelius, a more Republican area of Mecklenburg County near Trump’s club, said he is outperforming Trump in his district by a considerable margin, according to his internal polls. He takes that as evidence that Trump is struggling to shore up his base, and, significantly, failing to win over independents.

“Trump’s in serious trouble here,” he said, adding that Trump is getting “crunched” with independents. “I’m in much different shape, but it’s closer than it should be. I’m feeling the impact of the top of the ticket.”

Tarte said he has no plans to endorse Trump, though he expected that he would ultimately vote for him. His wife, however, is a different story.

“My wife’s a classic example: a lifelong Republican, but I don’t think she will vote for Trump,” he said. “Under no possible conditions, I don’t see her able to do that.”

The Clinton campaign is going all out to court voters like Tarte’s wife. In addition to aiming to re-create the Obama coalition — of young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women — that helped the president win here in 2008, the campaign is aggressively targeting suburban Republican women.

They have field offices, for example, in several places across suburban Wake County, including an office in North Raleigh, where more Republicans live, and another one in Cary, near Apex, with 26 offices total as part of the Democratic coordinated campaign. And Clinton has been on the airwaves with ads for weeks, many of which her team believes appeal to moderate Republicans, especially women. Her state director, Troy Clair, previously served as chief of staff to Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) and has been in place since late spring.

The Trump campaign was slated to begin running ads here on Friday — after long getting trashed on TV by Clinton — and while it took until Thursday for the Trump campaign to roll out what it is touting as a “significant staff increase” in the state, it is staffing up now.

Jason Simmons, who worked on Romney’s behalf in 2012 in North Carolina and also worked for McCrory, is Trump’s new state director. He came on board earlier this month. There is a Trump North Carolina communications director, Kirk Bell, who is a former chief of staff to Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), along with a coalitions director, political director and deputy state director.

The campaign has also said there are plans underway to open state offices across North Carolina, though it would not answer requests for more detail.

As in other states, the Trump campaign has been heavily reliant on the North Carolina GOP and on Republican National Committee staffers. There are about 70 paid, coordinated campaign employees on the ground, and they boast of “a couple hundred highly trained volunteers,” according to Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina GOP.

“We have a tremendous ground game that had been put in place long before we knew the nominee,” Woodhouse said.

Bell wasn’t reachable for comment Thursday afternoon.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, won North Carolina in 2014, and Woodhouse said robust party infrastructure has stayed in place since then.

He brushed off the poll that showed Clinton up 9 points, saying other surveys show the race within the margin of error.

“We all have work to do, but I think we have more upside, because she has a pretty hard ceiling,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what it is, it’s just, a whole lot of people aren’t going to vote for her. They know her, they see her TV ads, they aren’t going to help her. Trump has to get the kinks out a little bit, but I think he has an opportunity to get more people onboard.”

But some Republicans fear Trump is running out of time.

At the RNC in Cleveland last month, Sessions heard out the man concerned about the state of play in North Carolina, urging him to call his office. “That’s the only thing I can tell you,” he said, “because North Carolina is important.”