A North Carolina man is going viral after he told CNN he voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election because his girlfriend threatened she would break up with him if he refused.
“I wasn’t going to vote at all until my girlfriend was blowing up my phone, telling me to go vote,” Bryan Flores said after voting in Charlotte. “And if I didn’t, she was going to break up with me, so now I’m here.”
Flores, a Biden 2020 voter, later admitted, “I made that up, she didn’t say that, but it’s funny to say that,” and said she did ask him to go for Harris.
But Flores’s experience may be a common one.
A historic gender gap is expected to play a key role in determining the winner of the election, with polling suggesting Harris has nearly 20 percent more support among women than Donald Trump, who was instrumental in rolling back the constitutionally protected right to an abortion.
a voter in North Carolina tells CNN he wasn't going to vote but did when his girlfriend told him if he didn't vote for Harris she would break up with him pic.twitter.com/otq5h3nB5R
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2024
North Carolina is one of the key battleground states in the 2024 election, and its official election result has not yet been announced.
According to the most recent figures obtained by the Charlotte Observer, the Harris campaign has won just shy of 70 percent of the presidential vote in Flores’s polling place of Mecklenburg County, one of the areas with a large city the Harris is hoping to claim in this purple state.
As The Independent reported from North Carolina, going into election day, the Harris campaign seemed to have “all the momentum, while Trump was grasping for straws.”
Overall, Donald Trump has 52 percent of the vote so far in North Carolina, with less than half of the votes counted, according to recent estimates.
The state has endured its share of challenges this election season, including Hurricane Helene.
The storm tore across the state this fall, leveling towns like Asheville and leaving thousands without electricity and running water for weeks.
While observers worried the storms could depress turnout, there are some early indications that hasn’t been the case.
North Carolina election officials said Sunday that a “record turnout” of more than 4.2 million residents made their choice via in-person early voting, compared with 3.6 million who did so in 2020.
