North Carolina voters split their preferences again this election, voting for a Republican at the top of the ticket but several Democrats in other key races. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says there might be a variety of reasons.
So the election is over, and some of us are looking for silver linings wherever we can. So here’s one: Here in North Carolina, we avoided some statewide electoral disasters.
There were three Republican candidates who had lashed themselves to Donald Trump’s coattails, either by style or substance. In all three cases, those coattails were not quite long enough.
Mark Robinson lost to Josh Stein in the governor’s race. Michele Morrow lost to Mo Green for superintendent of public instruction. And Dan Bishop lost to Jeff Jackson for attorney general.
All three Democrats in those down-ballot races — Stein, Green, and Jackson — got more votes than Kamala Harris did. And the losing Republicans — Robinson, Morrow and Bishop — all got fewer votes than Trump did.
Clearly, there were some voters who voted for Trump and then crossed over to vote for the down-ballot Democrats.
The clearest example is in the attorney general’s race. Jackson, the Democrat, got nearly 159,000 more votes than Kamala Harris did. And Bishop, the Republican, got 180,000 votes fewer than Trump did.
Jackson was an especially strong candidate — he’s the most popular Democrat statewide. But still, losing on the same ballot as Trump has to be painful for Bishop. As a state legislator, he was the main author of North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill” — a precursor to the anti-trans campaign that Trump waged in countless TV ads. Not only that, as a member of Congress, Bishop voted to overturn the 2020 election results after Trump falsely claimed the election had been stolen. He could not have tied himself closer to Trump without surgery.
And yet 180,000 North Carolinians chose Trump but not him.
The governor’s race was a lot more obvious. Mark Robinson not only tripped over his own shoelaces, he then fell down a flight of stairs and rolled into an open sewer. I do still wonder if he wishes the last four years had not happened, and he could just go back to his old job and his, um, online proclivities. Either way, Josh Stein just had to stay out of the way, and he did so skillfully. And so we have a victory for diversity in this state — our first Jewish governor.
That leaves the race for superintendent of public instruction — the head of our K-12 school system. Michele Morrow seemed like the perfect Trumpian candidate — she had zero political experience and homeschooled her own kids. I guess it’s possible that her social media posts calling for the execution of former President Obama might have been a tweet too far for some voters.
But I also wonder if this is just part of a tradition in North Carolina of hedging our political bets.
This is still, clearly, a purple state. We have now voted for the Republican in 11 out of the last 12 presidential elections, the only exception being Obama in 2008. But we have also voted in a Democrat for governor in eight of the last nine elections, the exception being Pat McCrory in 2012.
In theory, this is how it’s supposed to work. We should pick the candidates we feel will do the best job, regardless of party. It just feels odd, in these polarized times, when it actually happens.
Trump won. But he did not win everything. And for now, that’s a comfort worth keeping.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
