Alexander H. Jones | Thoughts on the 50-50 state debate

The last five North Carolina elections have been decided by 2%, 1.5%, 3.7%, 2%, and 1.3%. That record of narrow electoral decisions should mark the Tar Heel state as one of the purplest states in the nation. But the following factor complicates that conclusion: Republicans have been on the winning side in four out of those five elections. By the same token, they won a momentous victory in the year just prior, taking control of the North Carolina General Assembly for the first time in 100 years and securing the right to draw election maps for the state. Gerrymandering has deepened the state’s reddish hue.

North Carolina, then, is a highly competitive state that leans Republican. Too many N.C. Democratic politicos’ vision of the state remains frozen in 2008, when the state voted for Barack Obama for president and appeared to be an emergent New South juggernaut for the Democratic Party. It was possible then to consider North Carolina a pure purple state clearly trending in a blue direction, and Democrats have built campaign after campaign on a blueprint derived from those assumptions. This strategy has resulted in Democrats falling short repeatedly in a state where they expected to have emerged at an advantage after 14 years of demographic change.

Unfortunately for FDR’s party, the forces that made North Carolina a solid-red state in the ten elections prior to Obama’s landslide did not vanish overnight when the charismatic Illinois senator narrowly tipped the state into the Democratic column. North Carolina is the most rural state among the 20 most-populous states in the country. Religion runs strong in the state, with North Carolina being the ninth-most religious state in the country. Six hundred and sixty-seven thousand veterans live in the state and Defense is the second-largest industry after agriculture. In an era when rural voters, evangelical Christians, and veterans comprise the core of the Republican base, North Carolina has become an elusive target for the Democrats.

That, however, is not the end of the story. The state’s underlying demographics do continue a slow march toward the Democratic Party. Almost all of the state’s population growth between 2010 and 2020 took place in urban areas, which have followed their counterparts across the Sun Belt into Democratic status. There’s no reason to expect that this trend hasn’t reached its conclusion. Wake County, North Carolina could easily jump from giving Democrats 60% of the vote, as in Loudoun County, Virginia, to 69%, as in Fairfax County. Mecklenburg County is already there, and the exurbs of both Charlotte and Raleigh are trending Democratic. Further, the state is getting more educated–an advantage for Democrats given that college-educated voters have become a vital Democratic constituency.

Republicans, meanwhile, have benefited from turnout levels that are simply extraordinary. One of the state’s most astute political observers, Dr. Michael Bitzer of Catawba College, speculated before the 2020 election that Republicans had maxed out rural turnout. That turned out to be wrong. Anchored by rural areas, Republican voters turned out at a staggering 81% rate, propelled to these stratospheric levels by their giddy adoration of Donald J. Trump. While their frothy rage over “Critical Race Theory” may continue to inspire high GOP turnout, it is hard to imagine the Democratic Party’s turnout disadvantage getting much worse by the end of the decade. Demographics will redound to the Democrats’ benefit.

So, while North Carolina is a purplish red state for the time being, the state may transition from narrow Republican victories to a small but sustainable Democratic lean by the end of this decade. Voters under the age of 40 and voters with college degrees or urban home addresses will provide a second wind to a party that has come up short repeatedly but remains more competitive than almost anywhere in the South. Democrats will have to fight tenaciously to reverse their streak of disappointments, but a rational assessment of trends and results says that the Party shouldn’t give up on the Tar Heel State.