Raleigh: "It's do or die at this point," says Sarah Miller.
Miller is a 27-year-old Democrat with a full time job in higher education, who went from volunteering for the Clinton campaign two evenings a week in September, to six days a week as the race intensified, and in these final days before the presidential election, is here at the party headquarters everyday, working the phones and knocking on doors.
She lives in North Carolina, a state so critical to the result of this election that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made time to visit its capital Raleigh on Monday, in a last ditch effort to tip the scales. Here nothing can be taken for granted, every vote must be fought for.
"Bottom line, the reason why I wanted to campaign was, God forbid something goes wrong and Trump wins, I want to be able to say I didn't stand by and not try to do something to prevent this," says Miller.
The southern state has been dubbed the "super battleground state" of this election. It will be almost impossible for Trump to win the White House without it and results are on a knife-edge: a New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll on Monday put Clinton and Trump tied at 44 per cent each. North Carolina was a safe Republican state for decades until Barack Obama won it in 2008, building a coalition of black, hispanic, progressive whites and young voters in the increasingly diverse state - a sign of a changing south.The Republicans won it back in 2012 - making it a true swing state.
"The fate of the world is teetering and you, North Carolina, are going to have to make sure that we push it in the right direction," President Barack Obama said here last week.
But the race here is also a contest like no other because of the fight that has already been going on, even before the election.
The Republican legislature and governor Pat McCrory - himself a hero to the right and villain to the left across the country - has tried to enact some of the most notorious voter restrictions of anywhere in the country, sparking a civil rights revolt one black leader called "our Selma", as well as opening a new front in the culture wars by enacting laws targeting transgender citizens, forcing them to use the bathroom on the birth certificate.
Just last Friday, a federal judge said she was "horrified" by a process which saw some 7000 voters - disproportionately African-American - stripped from the voting rolls.
Under the new local rules, individual citizens have been able to challenge the registration of another person in their county, and present evidence at a hearing of why their registration is invalid. If the person being challenged doesn't present to a hearing or rebut the evidence, they could be removed. District Judge Loretta Biggs labelled the process "insane" and said it sounded like something "that was put together in 1901". According to CNN, the judge found one single individual had challenged the registration of 4000 other voters in their county.
The case against the voter purge was brought by the civil rights organisation the NAACP, which said many people were removed after they simply failed to respond to a single piece of mail, and called it part of a coordinated effort to suppress the black vote. A preliminary injunction was granted, ordering all names removed in recent months to be restored.
That decision came three months after a federal appeals court found another series of voter restrictions introduced by the state - ostensibly to address voter fraud - targeted African-American voters "with almost surgical precision". The court found that Republicans had requested data on voter practices by race. "Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans," the court found.
Despite these decisions, some reforms remain in place - polling locations and early voting hours have been cut in many places. In one city, where the population is 40 per cent black, the number of polling places were slashed from five to two, according to one report. Preliminary figures show African-American turnout is down so far compared to 2012 - a fact the state GOP crowed about in a media release today.
Miller says she observed far longer lines during the early voting period this election as a result, and that some here seem disheartened.
[Sarah Miller phones volunteers in the closing days of the campaign.]
Sarah Miller phones volunteers in the closing days of the campaign.
"I have spoken to others who say they do feel defeated, who say what's the point of going out to vote," she says. "To me that is truly heartbreaking."
Voting rights has not been the only controversy to engulf North Carolina this year - the state also passed a controversial bill known as HB2 that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for LGBTI people and forced public schools and agencies to segregate bathrooms according to people's sex on their birth certificate - meaning transgender people were forced to use the bathroom of the sex at birth, not their gender identity. The national backlash to the so-called "bathroom bill" has been huge - condemned by companies like Apple, American Airlines and PayPal, and the state has been boycotted by artists like Bruce Springsteen and major sporting events. Forbes has estimated it has cost the state more than $US600 million in business.
It's also galvanised the LGTBIQ community to fight in this state. Stephanie Fritsch is another volunteer we met in Raleigh on Sunday. She's a transgender woman and activist from Pennsylvania, who drove nine hours to the state on Friday to join the effort. "Whoever wins here will win the country in my mind," she said.
Fritsch was once a registered Republican but said as a proud transgender woman, she could not stay with the party, and became a Democrat: "We break barriers, we make things happen."
The governor Pat McCrory, who campaigned with Trump in Raleigh on Monday, seemed to relish the acrimony. He wore the tag of "deplorable" - the word used by Clinton to describe some Trump supporters - proudly: "Deplorable now days is someone who believes we ought not be paying as much taxes as we were before right?... Deplorable is protecting the basic common sense definition of gender!"
All the races here are tight and hugely consequential - the senate race is close too and could help decide which party controls the senate, and voters will also decide whether or not to re-elect McCrory.
The Reverend William Barber, the head of the state chapter of the NAACP who has been leading the charge against the voting restrictions, believes the coalition that helped elect Obama in 2008 can do it again for the Democrats this year in spite of everything they've been through.
"I see black and white and young and old and gay and straight coming together, and Latinos," he told a rally last week. "I know that the South is rising again for a fresh transformation."
