Democrats had high hopes for North Carolina in last week’s presidential election, and those hopes hinged in large part on Mecklenburg County. The last time a Democrat won the state was Barack Obama in 2008. Mecklenburg County has the highest number of registered Democrats in North Carolina, and it's home to the most Black voters in the state. But Democrats' Mecklenburg strategy fell short — again. Reporter Matt Hartman, who wrote about it for the Assembly. joins me now.
Marshall Terry: So Kamala Harris did win Mecklenburg, but of course Donald Trump won the state. Turnout in Mecklenburg last week was 69%, which was below the state average. That's in line with a history of low voter turnout in Mecklenburg. What’s keeping voters at home in this county?
Matt Hartman: Well, I think on a basic level, the county Democratic Party hasn't been very organized in the past. I think one of the things that stuck out to me is that Hugh McColl, the former Bank of America CEO, is a frequent donor to Democratic candidates, lives in the county. Before this year, he had just never given to the county party before. They never had any paid staff before this year. There's a lot of theories about why that is, about Charlotte being a business city rather than a politics city, or the urban core being so democratic that they didn't have to build up a strong party base to win local elections. And that's sort of eroded things over time. I don't know which of those makes the most sense in the long run, but I think the most important part for why democratic turnout has been low compared to other blue counties is just that they weren't as organized.
Terry: OK. So you write Democrats spent two years working to boost Mecklenburg turnout. What did they do?
Hartman: Well, the first thing they did is they flipped the local government in Huntersville from all Republican to all Democrat. As a sort of proof of concept, they started building from there, and they did a lot of the stuff they hadn't done before. They hired staff. And they started a Latino outreach effort — although that didn't begin until just about a few weeks before the election. They raised a lot of money, a lot more money. Hugh McColl gave them $40,000 this year. And they also did some sort of smaller stuff on a hyperlocal level that I think made them a little more organized and a little more effective. So one of the things I heard about was rather than having precinct chairs, reorganizing into more natural neighborhoods and finding volunteers who would coordinate those collections of precincts so they could be more effective. And what all that built up to is they just knocked a lot of doors and they made a lot of calls.
Terry: So, they did all that and still came up short. In fact, Harris got fewer overall votes in Mecklenburg than Joe Biden did. So how's that possible?
Hartman: Well, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that there's a swing to the right here across the country and across the state. So they're a little bit swimming upstream. In Mecklenburg, I think there's sort of a mixed bag. I'll preface all this by saying that this is provisional data still. It looks to me like they improved in some places in some of the suburban areas of the county, right? So Harris' margins over Trump improved over Biden's in some of the suburban areas like Huntersville and Mint Hill, but they lost ground in others like Pineville and some of the areas near Lake Wylie. But I think the big picture here is that they seem to lose a lot of ground in the Crescent and those historically lower-income neighborhoods with more people of color. Zooming out from all that, it looks to me like a lot of their efforts had an impact, but they just weren't active enough in enough places.
Terry: And to be clear, strategists aren't saying Mecklenburg turnout is the silver bullet for Democrats in North Carolina, right?
Hartman: Correct. So if you look back to 2020, Joe Biden lost the state by about 70,000 votes. The numbers I heard from Mecklenburg was that the Democrats thought they could make up about 40,000 of those votes in the county alone, just given the number of Democrats and the fact that turnout has been historically lower there. So couldn't win the state in Mecklenburg alone, but they could make up about half of the solution there. And that, as you said earlier, just didn't happen. They actually lost ground. So Joe Biden won Mecklenburg County by about 200,000 votes. Harris won it only by 190,000.
Terry: So, what's the takeaway for Democrats in Mecklenburg County as they look to the midterms and 2028?
Hartman: At this point? I still have more questions than answers, and I think they should feel the same way. I think it's important to remind ourselves that the precinct data is not even final yet. So there's still a lot more questions to ask once that comes in and a lot more analysis to do.
I think one of the quirks and difficulties about electoral organizing is that you can do everything right and lose — or do everything wrong and win — because there are so many factors about the personalities of the candidates, and international macroeconomic trends, and all those sorts of things. When you look at some of the precincts where things seem to go really well — and it looks like their organizing efforts, their get-out-the-vote efforts improved Harris' margins — I think it's worth looking really critically at that to see if you can find other possible explanations.
So did the demographics of those neighborhoods change? Were there particularly good precinct chairs there? What are those other possible explanations? Similarly, I think when you look at the places where things went wrong, places where Harris' margins shrank over Biden's in 2020, I think it's worth comparing those neighborhoods in those precincts to similar areas in the state and the country.
I think there's also a lot of other changes about how voting happened that are big question marks for me. So one of the things Republicans have said is that voting methods in 2020, which were complicated by the COVID pandemic, meant that there were way more absentee votes than normal. Alternatively, looking at this year, this is the first election here where we had voter ID requirements, and so what impact did that have on voters? The democratic worry had always been that it would suppress votes, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and that seems to be where Harris lost a lot of ground. So, I think that's worth taking a good look at.
The other thing that sort of happened since my story came out is that the executive director of the Mecklenburg Democratic Party resigned publicly alleging racism and nepotism within the party. So obviously that has to be taken very seriously.
Big picture, I think what they need to do is make sure that the party is connected with the people in the county. One of the things many people told me is that they want to build a year-round organization, right? They don't want the local party to be the kind of thing that shows up every two years or every four years and asks for a vote and then disappears. But they want to be in people's lives. Now the question is how do you do that and where do you do that? And figuring out exactly where it's falling short. What are the kinds of neighborhoods, what are the kinds of people that you're not reaching? And how do you rebuild that connection and rebuild that trust?
