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Poll Finds Tillis, Forest Leading In GOP Races As Trump Plans NC Trip

President Donald Trump speaks during the North Carolina Opportunity Now Summit in Charlotte, N.C., Friday, Feb. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

President Donald Trump is planning to visit North Carolina on the eve of the March 3 primary. Here's how the major races in the state's Republican primary are shaping up, according to a recent poll from High Point University.

Both the presidential and U.S. Senate race have Republican incumbents.

North Carolina Republican voters will have three choices for president, with former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Congressman Joe Walsh joining President Trump on the ballot.

But Walsh has since ended his campaign and polling shows Weld in the single digits, so Trump should easily prevail here.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis is also facing some opposition from lesser-known GOP candidates. The man who was expected to give him the toughest fight, businessman Garland Tucker, decided in the fall not to challenge him. None of the other three candidates reached double-digits in High Point's poll.

The biggest seat in which there is not an incumbent Republican is the governor's. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and state Rep. Holly Grange are the GOP candidates.

The poll shows Forest with a substantial lead, but many voters say they're undecided.

Trump's campaign announced on Friday that the president would attend a rally March 2 at Charlotte's Bojangles Coliseum.

The president held rallies a few days before the presidential caucus in Iowa and the evening before the primary in New Hampshire.

Trump won North Carolina by almost 4 percentage points in the 2016 general election. The state is expected to be a presidential battleground this November, too.

Trump came to Charlotte earlier this month to highlight a new economic revitalization program.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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