The six political states of North Carolina

The six political states of North Carolina
Story by David Weigel Map by Lauren Tierney
Aug. 23, 2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/north-carolina-political-geography/

For a long time, Republicans who ran for president didn’t have to worry about North Carolina, even when Democrats did well down ballot. 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. And until 2010, Democrats controlled the legislature, drew the state’s maps and kept conservatives locked out of power.

That changed with the 2010 tea party wave, and since 2016 the state has been gripped by partisan warfare between Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and a Republican legislature that has limited his power to defy them. 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.

Yet presidential races here have gotten competitive ever since 2008, when Barack Obama became the first Democratic candidate in 32 years to win it. 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.

Three in 10 of all voters in 2016 were non-White, according to exit polls, and they backed Hillary Clinton by 61 points. 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). One reason: Most of North Carolina’s White voters hold college degrees, and that demographic, once solidly Republican, began to move in 2016.

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