Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will hold a rally in Selma, North Carolina this evening, his third event of the day and one of his last events of the general election.
Trump will speak from The Farm beginning at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The rally can be viewed live via the embedded YouTube player via Right Side Broadcasting.
Donald Trump previously held a campaign event in Concord, North Carolina, and on Saturday, he returns to the state for a rally in Wilmington and then in Raleigh. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been focused on North Carolina this week, with Clinton recently speaking in Greenville and then in Raleigh.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t necessarily need North Carolina to win; after all, Barack Obama lost the state in 2012 and still had no problem getting to 270 Electoral College votes. But Trump’s pathway to 270 is much more narrow, and so losing North Carolina would make it very difficult for him to become president.
In Real Clear Politics’ polling average, Trump and Clinton are statistically tied in North Carolina, with Trump currently slightly ahead by just 0.2 percentage points. And good news for the Trump campaign is the fact that Democratic turnout is down this year compared to 2012, at least in early voting. So far, 43 percent of the votes cast in early voting have come from Democrats, while 32 percent came from Republicans. This seems like a large lead, but in 2008, Democrats made up 48 percent of the early vote compared to Republicans’ 32 percent, and Mitt Romney ended up winning the state anyway.
Although Trump’s rallies used to be completely improvised, and therefore each event was different from one another, Trump has in recent days been giving the same stump speech at every event, reading from a teleprompter and clearly hoping to stay on message and to keep the media focused on Hillary Clinton.
“Stay on point, Donald, stay on point,” he recently said to himself at a rally in a joking tone. “No sidetracks Donald, nice and easy.”