Greensboro, North Carolina: Donald Trump was visibly shaken. The former US president was almost an hour into a rally when someone in the audience collapsed, abruptly halting his campaign speech.

Suddenly, Trump’s usual bravado and bluster were gone, replaced by a look of genuine concern as he stood silently on the stage for several minutes while emergency medics performed CPR on one of his fans.

At one point, the 77-year-old Republican turned towards his team on the other side of the room and pointed to his heart as if to indicate the person who collapsed had suffered a heart attack.

“I think he’s gonna be all right,” a clearly rattled Trump said after the man was resuscitated and taken out of the stadium. “But boy … that was a bad one.”

It was a dramatic moment during a critical Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, where thousands of people lined up for hours just to hear him speak on the eve of the Super Tuesday primary races earlier this month.

Vice President Kamala Harris was also in North Carolina that weekend, talking up the Biden administration’s economic credentials ahead of another visit with the president next week.

And former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley was there too, crisscrossing the state in one of her final attempts to slow Trump’s inevitable march to the presidential nomination.

Their presence was emblematic of how important North Carolina will be as Trump and Biden go head-to-head over the next eight months to secure another term in the White House.

While US elections tend to centre on the usual battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona among them – party strategists believe the 2024 path to the Oval Office runs through volatile, swinging North Carolina, where Republicans, Democrats and independents each account for about a third of the voting population.

It’s here that the conservative-dominated state legislature recently redrew the congressional map to give Republicans an advantage – a process known as partisan “gerrymandering” – which could help the party flip several Democrat seats in Congress.

It’s also here that Trump hand-picked North Carolina Republican chair Michael Whatley (as well as his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump) as the new head of the Republican National Committee to oversee the party’s fundraising, election strategy, and national convention this year.

And it’s here where unaffiliated voters, who now account for 36 per cent of the 7.3 million registered voters, have become the focus of a Republican strategy to return the ex-president to power.

Codename: Operation Domino.

“North Carolina is one of the most important states for the presidency of the United States,” says Steve Bersgtrom, the Republican chair of Wake County, which includes the state capital, Raleigh, and its affluent neighbourhoods, universities and world-class medical centres.

“President Trump won North Carolina by 1.4 per cent in 2020, and that margin is expected to be even slimmer this year. The reason for that is we’ve had a tremendous influx of individuals from traditionally more ‘blue’ states, such as New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

“That’s led to an increase in what we call unaffiliated voters, and they obviously represent the biggest voting demographic that any candidate has to focus on.”

It’s mid-afternoon in Wake County, and Bergstrom, a former airforce pilot, is standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation explaining what he believes could help Trump to victory this year.

Put simply, Operation Domino involves identifying winnable and “toss-up” races in the newly drawn congressional districts, and then ploughing resources into flipping them.

Under the controversial new map, for instance, it is expected that about half the seven Democrats representing North Carolina in the US House of Representatives could be knocked out at the election because districts have been redistributed against them.

The job of party officials like Bergstrom is to identify key contests, mobilise volunteers and candidates, and then persuade unaffiliated voters within them to support Trump at the election in November, as well as Republican candidates also on the ballot for state and federal races.

By tapping into issues such as the crisis at the US-Mexico border, inflation, and community safety, the goal, he says, is to “make it so that North Carolina is no longer a swing state in the national scene”.

“People see real problems, and they want real answers,” he says, insisting there is a mood for change. “So I think as far as the rematch goes, the current incumbent is going to have a difficult time overcoming policies.”

Biden, meanwhile, has also turned his eye to North Carolina, according to a campaign memo released this week. While a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t managed to win the state since Barack Obama in 2008, the party sees a fresh opportunity this year given Trump’s tiny margin in 2020, plus population growth in urban areas and the fresh push to ban abortion after 12 weeks with almost no exceptions.

The president is also hoping to capitalise on a controversial state governor race that will also play out this year, in which Trump has endorsed Republican Mark Robinson, an extremist who has described LGBTQ people as “filth”, referred to feminists as “Fem-Nazis” and suggested that the Holocaust was “hogwash”.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA ally, Mark Robinson, are peddling a dangerous and divisive agenda to North Carolinians, but the voters aren’t buying it,” says Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison.

Whether he’s right is open to debate. Some, like Brier Creek resident and party volunteer Larry Jennings are firm believers of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” ethos.

Jennings says he wants immigration fixed and cost-of-living pressures reduced, and subscribes to the view that Trump is a victim of a political witch hunt designed to stop him from being re-elected.

Asked if he would still vote for Trump if he were convicted of the criminal charges he faces – election subversion, mishandling classified documents, hush money to silence a porn star – Jennings is adamant: “He won’t get convicted.”

Others, like Democrat Marcia Perry, support 81-year-old Biden but admit his age and ability to do the job for another four years are concerns.

But Perry also reckons that many voters don’t realise what’s at stake if Trump wins and says Biden needs to do a much better job of articulating that.

“People don’t quite understand the enormity of the choice between what the Democrats have to offer and what the Republicans are going to take away,” she says.

“He needs to sell the message more, and he’s got to get young people out there selling the message, too.”

Young people could indeed make all the difference at this election, particularly in the urban centres where population growth has shifted the political landscape.

In Wake County, for instance, Republican president Ronald Reagan won the area by 23 per cent in 1984. But by 2004, that margin had significantly dropped, and George W. Bush won it by a tiny margin of 2 per cent. In 2020, Biden won Wake County by 26 per cent.

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But many young people have told this masthead they lack enthusiasm for the Trump-Biden rematch and don’t necessarily trust either on important issues like Ukraine, climate change, gun violence, healthcare, crime and the Israel-Hamas war.

“We’ve come of age in a very dynamic and interesting political time, and so those things are very present in our minds … and there’s a lot of anxiety right now,” says Pilar Kelly, a student at North Carolina’s prestigious Duke University.

“But what’s really important is to not blame young people for not showing up to vote. When there is a low turnout rate, the question is: what is the government doing wrong to not inspire hope?”

Back at his rally in Greensboro, not long after medics resuscitated his supporter, Trump is less concerned about instilling hope and more concerned with portraying America as a “nation in decline” under Biden.

As he concludes his speech, he warns of another “great depression” if he isn’t re-elected, claims the US is being invaded by illegal immigrants coming from jails and “insane asylums”, and urges North Carolinians to head to the polls to deliver him a resounding victory “too big to rig”.

“2024 is our final battle,” he tells them.

Perhaps, for Trump, it is. And North Carolina is a crucial battleground that could make all the difference.

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