Swing state again The Associated Press had already called the presidential race for Barack Obama that night in November 2008. One state they had not called was mine. After the celebration at our watch party subsided, the TV still showed Sen. John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina. There was only one county of the handful left to report with any quantity of votes in it. Again, mine. Where was Buncombe? A friend, a precinct election judge, pushed through the crowd and slid up on my right. He’d just arrived from the Board of Elections office where they’d had a data upload glitch. He shoved a sheaf of printouts into my hand. The tally read 17,000 net votes for Obama. North Carolina just went blue. That’s a feeling we haven’t revisited since then. Maybe this year. New York Times: President Biden’s campaign declared in its earliest days that he had a strong chance of winning North Carolina, even though no Democrat had captured the state since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. That claim began to look implausible as Mr. Biden plummeted in the polls and Democrats grew anxious about reliably blue states like Minnesota and Virginia. Now the party has a brand-new candidate in Vice President Kamala Harris and with her, an energized voting base and reshuffled political map. As she visits North Carolina on Friday to lay out her economic agenda, Democrats there are feeling hopeful again about delivering her a state where success has eluded them for…