This is Washington Edition, the newsletter about money, power and politics in the nation’s capital. Today, senior writer for economics Shawn Donnan dives into what population growth in North Carolina means for the political map there.

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There are wild cards aplenty in the presidential election, and one of the biggest is just what impact population changes will have on the vote in key battlegrounds.

We dove into the data for North Carolina. What emerged explains why a once-reliably Republican state is up for grabs in 2024, with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a dead heat just a week out from Election Day.

To start, there are 400,000 more registered voters in North Carolina this year than there were in 2020 when Trump carried the state and its 16 electoral college votes by just 74,000 votes. Perhaps even more significant, there are 450,000 more unaffiliated voters this year than in the last presidential election cycle.

The Trump and Harris campaigns each claim to have the edge with unaffiliated voters. Republicans cite optimistically the fact that there are 200,000 fewer registered Democrats in the Tar Heel State than in 2020. 

Still, it’s exactly where all those new voters are located that may offer the biggest clue to their political impact. The big blue metro areas of Raleigh and Charlotte are growing rapidly. So too, though, are the red suburban counties around them. And in those counties both sides see signs of a shift to the middle likely to reverberate in 2024 and beyond. 

In Johnston County, southeast of Raleigh, the growth has been driven by pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk, the maker of weight loss drug Ozempic. Trump carried the county by 27,000 votes in 2020. Democrats think they have a good chance of narrowing that margin this year because of the new arrivals.

To Sharon Castleberry, the local Democratic party chair, even loosening Trump’s hold on Johnston County from the 61% of the vote he got in 2020 to 55% would be a “big deal” and “scare the whatever out of the other side.”

Marshall Conrad, who chairs the county’s Republican Party, counters that while new arrivals have pulled the county toward the political middle he still thinks many unaffiliated voters will vote Republican. 

One way or the other we’ll learn in the coming weeks just how much of an impact population changes in battleground states will have on the result. The best clue, though, may come from those booming suburbs in North Carolina.— Shawn Donnan 

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Judges are rushing to clear a final wave of time-sensitive fights over how Americans will vote in the November election, with US courts fielding one new lawsuit per day on average this month.

Conspiracy theorists who believe Trump won the 2020 election are making plans online to monitor and film polling places in swing states, an effort that civil rights groups say risks suppressing voter turnout.

Harris makes her closing argument tonight from Washington’s National Mall, looking to cast Trump as a man consumed by grievance and retribution in the hope that Americans will prove willing to turn the page. 

Trump, meanwhile, sought to preempt Harris’ remarks, casting the US as a nation overrun by migrants and crime and with a failing economy while speaking in Florida. 

Fresh data from the Federal Election Commission show that Harris’ efforts to re-engage with the tech industry have paid off — literally — by encouraging new donations and stemming Silicon Valley’s pro-Trump shift. 

A surprisingly competitive political race in deep-red Nebraska — featuring a politically unaffiliated first-time candidate — is complicating Republicans’ plans to flip the US Senate.

Business-disrupting hurricanes and a major labor strike at Boeing means that October employment data — due Friday — will be hard to parse. US job openings, meanwhile, fell in September. 

US consumer confidence increased in October by the most since March 2021 on optimism about the broader economy and the labor market.

Sweeping, clean-energy-focused government incentives designed to restore US prowess in the solar panel market are spawning joint ventures that enable China-linked companies to sidestep tariffs. 

The US Air Force paid more than 80 times the commercially available cost for lavatory soap dispensers on the Boeing Co. C-17 military transportation aircraft.

Today on Bloomberg Television’s Balance of Power early edition at 1 p.m., hosts Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz interviewed Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, about vitriolic rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail and Black voter turnout. 

On the program at 5 p.m., they talk with Representative Mark Alford, a Missouri Republican, about the state of the presidential race and Trump's economic plan.

On the Big Take podcast, Bloomberg Opinion’s John Authers sits down with host David Gura to break down "The Trump Trade," and what it reveals about how Wall Street sees the presidential election and the future of the economy.. Listen on iHeart, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

On the heels of the pandemic, homeowners in many of America's largest cities saw relatively tepid price gains as people flocked to the suburbs — or further — driving up values in those locales. In the past year, that pattern has reversed. Home price gains in the largest metro areas have outpaced national level gains. New York City reported the highest annual gain among large metros with an 8.1% increase in August, according to newly released data from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller. The jump in the Big Apple is close to twice the 4.2% annual gain recorded nationally. In the next two largest cities, Los Angeles and Chicago, prices increased 5.9% and 7.2%, respectively. Overall, the 10 largest cities showed year-over-year growth of 6%. — Alex Tanzi 

Harris is scheduled to campaign in Wisconsin tomorrow. 

Trump is also set to campaign in Wisconsin tomorrow. 

US third-quarter GDP data will be released tomorrow. 

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge — the core PCE deflator — is due out Thursday. 

Hiring and unemployment for October will be reported on Friday. 

US elections take place on Nov. 5. 

The Federal Reserve is scheduled to meet on Nov. 7. 

• With a paucity of child care dragging on the labor market and a dearth of policy solutions at the federal level, local leaders are pitching property and sales tax hikes to address the issue, the Wall Street Journal reports. 
• Two ballot drop boxes in the Pacific Northwest were damaged in a suspected arson attack just over a week before Election Day, destroying hundreds of ballots at one location in Vancouver, Washington, according to the Associated Press. 

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