Only New Hanover County and the city of Wilmington got friendlier to Democrats, and only barely, with both Trump and Clinton winning more votes than the party’s 2012 nominees. Clinton lost Bladen and Robeson County after Barack Obama had won them twice closer to the Outer Banks and the rest of the Atlantic Coast, she lost even more decisively. In 2019, Republicans held on to the old 9th Congressional District thanks to a 21-point win in exurban Union County - and that was their smallest margin out of the county in years.ĭonald Trump’s 2016 North Carolina victory had a lot to do with the few conservative Democrats still voting here deciding, finally, to bolt.
That has been crucial for Republicans - their dominance in Cabarrus, Gaston and Union counties erases much of the Democratic strength in Charlotte, and only in close suburbs such as Concord did the GOP lose any ground in 2016. And when Republicans abandoned plans to host their convention in Charlotte, voters told pollsters that they approved.Ĭharlotte’s growth has powered new development in its surrounding counties, but it has not turned the entire region blue.
John Kerry won it by 11,744 votes, a margin Obama grew to 100,110 votes in 2008 and Hillary Clinton expanded to 139,044 votes. Republicans held city hall for 22 years, losing it narrowly during Barack Obama’s presidency, and Obama was the first modern Democratic presidential candidate to decisively win Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County. North Carolina’s biggest city wasn’t a Democratic stronghold until fairly recently. The decline was worth tens of thousands of votes, not decisive statewide, but one more problem for a Democrat trying to beat the Republican strength in the other rural parts of the state. Four counties flipped from blue to red (Granville, Nash, Gates, Martin), and only Pitt County, with the city of Greenville, got more Democratic. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton turned out fewer Black voters than Barack Obama had in his two presidential races, Democratic margins shrunk here just as they did in Detroit and Milwaukee. Butterfield but making nearby Republican-friendly seats markedly Whiter. When Republicans redrew the electoral maps nine years ago, they packed voters from the Black Belt together with voters from Durham, shoring up Democratic Rep. Even now, decades after the Great Migration, these mostly rural counties have sizable Black populations or even Black majorities. It had some of the richest, blackest soil in the country, and to till it, plantation owners enslaved millions of people. Stretching from southern Virginia to the tip of East Texas, the “black belt” has always had a double, overlapping meaning. It added more than 10,000 votes, but it did so while trading voters in rural areas for gains in the suburbs of Charlotte, Raleigh and other cities. Unlike parts of the Midwest, where defeat in 2016 came during a decline in Democratic turnout, the party actually gained ground with the Clinton-Kaine ticket. One reason: Most of North Carolina’s White voters hold college degrees, and that demographic, once solidly Republican, began to move in 2016. White voters backed Trump by 31 points, but that was a smaller margin than Republicans got out of the White electorate in Georgia (54 points) or Texas (43 points). Three in 10 of all voters in 2016 were non-White, according to exit polls, and they backed Hillary Clinton by 61 points. Obama didn’t need North Carolina to carry the electoral college, and he lost the state in 2012, but it has become a place Republicans need to compete for.
Yet presidential races here have gotten competitive ever since 2008, when Barack Obama became the first Democratic candidate in 32 years to win it. In the past 10 years, Republicans drew maps and passed voting laws that repeatedly have been struck down as unfair, with one map judged to have targeted Black voters “with surgical precision.” North Carolina has become a microcosm of America: Cities and suburbs have grown bluer, White rural areas have grown redder, and, when one party wins, it makes the place inhospitable for the other one. Roy Cooper and a Republican legislature that has limited his power to defy them. That changed with the 2010 tea party wave, and since 2016 the state has been gripped by partisan warfare between Democratic Gov.
And until 2010, Democrats controlled the legislature, drew the state’s maps and kept conservatives locked out of power. Democrats have held the governor’s office here for all but four years this century, and since the 1970s, no Senate race here has been won with more than 55 percent of the vote. For a long time, Republicans who ran for president didn’t have to worry about North Carolina, even when Democrats did well down ballot.
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