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The Washington Post has a great interactive map showing the county-by-county swing from 2020 to 2024 in the presidential election.
Here is an image of North Carolina and neighboring states:
As you can see, much of the Piedmont was a draw compared to the 2020 election. Then look at South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. In places where Harris didn’t run commercials, hold campaign events or canvass, the swing to the right was much stronger.
That suggests the Harris campaign’s efforts in North Carolina made a difference — just not enough. It was more Band-Aid than blood transfusion.
Dave Wasserman noted on social media that in the seven battleground states, the 2020 to 2024 swing to Trump was 3.1 points. Everywhere else it was 6.7 points.
Here are some thoughts about North Carolina:
- The mountains shifted to the left. Perhaps that is because Hurricane Helene jumbled the election, or maybe many of those mountain counties are becoming less red.
- The good news for Democrats is that many suburban counties became more pink, even while the state went more red.
In the Charlotte area, Democrats lost support in Mecklenburg County and Union County. But they did better in Cabarrus, Gaston and Lincoln counties. Johnston County, outside of Raleigh, also shifted slightly to the left.
These are building blocks the party can use to win future elections, starting with the 2026 U.S. Senate race.
- The North Carolina Democratic Party made rural outreach a priority under new party chair Anderson Clayton, who is from Person County.
Clayton scored some wins, such as an apparent flip of a state House seat from red to blue in Granville and Vance counties. That helped break the GOP supermajority in the state House.
(Democratic Rep. Don Davis won reelection in the rural northeast after the General Assembly tweaked his district to give Republicans a better chance. But Davis’ victory was arguably his and his alone. He rebuked President Biden and national Democrats and had been called the most bipartisan freshman Democrat.)
But outside of the mountains, rural counties were the worst-performing counties for Democrats.
That’s not to say it’s the state Democratic Party’s fault. Until the national party elevates candidates with rural backgrounds or moves to the center on cultural issues, it’s hard to see this changing.
- The Mecklenburg Democratic Party made improving turnout a priority. In the 2022 election, only seven of 100 N.C. counties had lower turnout than Mecklenburg.
Mail ballots are still being counted, but Mecklenburg is again near the bottom: Only 11 counties saw lower turnout.
The backlash has already started.
The county party’s executive director, Monifa Drayton, quit a day after the election. In a resignation letter, she said that most of her duties were taken away and that she was relegated to working with minority communities. She said her experience was that of “professional Black women during the Jim Crow era.”
