Early Polling Shows Clinton Support In NC Not As Strong As Obama's Campaigns

Hillary Clinton made her long-anticipated candidacy for the White House official Sunday. Early polling suggests she has some work to do to win over North Carolina voters.

David McLennan is a political science professor at Meredith College. He says polling conducted last month shows she's not running as strongly as Barack Obama did among key groups of Democrats.

“Barack Obama won, for example, 96 percent of African-American votes," he says. "Hillary Clinton doesn't poll as well in that community as Barack Obama. Even with single, urban women, she runs pretty well but not nearly as strong as Barack Obama did, particularly in 2008."

Obama went on to win the state in the 2008 election but narrowly lost it to Mitt Romney in 2012.

Republican candidates will have their own challenges in North Carolina.  McLennan says GOP candidates will have to figure out how to unite the state's traditional pro-business Republicans with more hard-line social conservatives. 

North Carolina is expected to be an important swing state in the 2016 election.