It wasn’t so much a blue wave as it was a blue mist permeating North Carolina’s municipal elections.
On Nov. 4, while Democrats rode a tsunami of anti-establishment discontent to victory nationally, from New Jersey and Virginia governorships to California’s redistricting proposition, North Carolina held its own, smaller elections in hundreds of municipalities.
In some ways, North Carolinians followed the national Democratic tide. Durham voter Chris Williams said both local and national issues played into his vote; he was concerned about affordable housing on the local level, but also about Donald Trump’s immigration agenda on the national level. Greensboro couple Morgan and Christopher Drazek said they voted for liberal candidates to balance out the nation’s broader political conservatism.
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But in a political world with very little left to nationalize, some votes remained solely about local issues and local candidates. Apex voters Kevin and Maggie Fitzgerald, for example, were lasered in on how their choices would influence local growth and development, not what Congress or the President were up to.
Registered Democrats flipped about 133 seats from Republican to Democratic across the state on Nov. 4, according to North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton.
But there’s a catch: the overwhelming majority of North Carolina’s municipal races are nonpartisan. In name, at least. It doesn’t take much effort to find out who the Democrats and Republicans are in nonpartisan municipal races. Between county party endorsements, campaign messaging and volunteers handing out sample ballots for each party outside most polling places, partisanship finds its ways through the cracks.
According to a Carolina Public Press analysis, registered Democrats took control of at least 14 mayoral seats formerly held by registered Republicans or Independents. Democrats flipped more seats on town and city councils, Clayton said.
While this may elicit enthusiasm from Democrats, it doesn’t necessarily predict a blue wave in next year’s midterm elections, when North Carolina will elect members of its state legislature, Congressional delegation and courts.
Hints of a blue wave
From the outside looking in, not many would expect a first-time Democratic candidate to win Lewisville’s mayoral election.
But that’s just what 33-year-old Billy Carter did. Carter is Black, he works in sales and he never got his college degree. That’s a striking contrast to his opponent, Kevin Sharp, a White, retired doctor who’s well-versed in politics, Carter noted.
Lewisville is a conservative, suburban town in Forsyth County. In 2024, seven of its nine precincts went for Trump. But Carter figured if he could just turn out more Democrats, he could win.
“Just with the nature of politics, I felt like there were enough Independents who were pretty much fed up with the Republican agenda nationally with Trump, but also locally with (State Rep.) Jeff Zenger.”
While Zenger’s name was not on the ballot this year, it was definitely on people’s minds, Carter said. Zenger owns a development company, and threatened to sue the Town Council over denied development plans. The battle ended in 2023 with a nearly-$2 million payout for Zenger and his company. This year, Zenger also sponsored a bill that would have shifted some development decision-making from local governments to Raleigh.
Carter drew a comparison between bitter feelings toward Zenger and Trump. Both, in his view, are embroiled in conflicts of interest to enrich themselves, instead of doing what’s best for the people they serve.
Carter defeated his Republican opponent, Kevin Sharp, by six percentage points. His only regret is not getting more Democrats to run against Republicans in Forsyth County. Carter thinks they could have made even deeper gains.
“Folks were looking to vote for a Democrat,” he said.
Over in Burlington, Democrats Ian Baltutis and Jeffrey Smythe won seats on the Town Council. Before, the council had two registered Democrats, one registered Republican and two Independents. Now, it’s four Democrats and one progressive Independent.
A combination of factors were at play, “but the blue wave did help,” Baltutis said. While canvassing, Baltutis clearly identified himself as a Democrat, despite the nonpartisan label of the race. He feels it paid off.
Burlingtonians told Baltutisi about their affordability struggles and the changes that came with the federal administration during the campaign cycle.
“A lot of folks were just looking for hope, and looking for Democrats as the embodiment of that hope, of somebody to put up some resistance,” he said.
Trump’s approval ratings are slipping in North Carolina, according to a pair of recent polls. In the past month, a Catawba-YouGov poll and Emerson College poll found his approval wavering in the low-40s overall, and among independent voters, who make up a third of the state’s electorate.
Nearly three-quarters of Emerson poll respondents said their midterm election vote would be a referendum on Trump — either a vote for Democrats as a way to oppose Trump’s agenda, or a vote for Republicans to support it.
Clayton thinks there is reason for Republicans on the state level to worry about the signal the municipal results conveyed, particularly state lawmakers like State Reps. Erin Paré, R-Wake, and Tricia Cotham, R-Mecklenburg, who won their seats by narrow margins in 2024.
“We saw the wins that we needed to in places where we currently have Republicans holding, in my opinion, Democratic seats right now in the state legislature that we need to take,” Clayton said. “And when you're looking at the numbers that we have in the state legislature right now, that, to me, is the difference in making sure that we've got somewhat of a working minority next year.”
Not necessarily blue, just new
A few years ago, Alex Joyner, 41, didn’t expect to one day be mayor of Farmville, a town of about 4,500 in Pitt County. But now he is, after successfully unseating six-year mayor John O’Moore.
Joyner is a registered Democrat and O’Moore is a registered Republican, although that’s not so relevant in Farmville’s nonpartisan election, in Joyner’s opinion.
More relevant is that, before O’Moore’s time as mayor, he spent an additional 12 years in local government. And also that a 2023 state audit that found mismanagement of taxpayer dollars still looms large over the town.
“There was a definite feeling of a need for change to happen here,” Joyner said. “... I believe that what happened here in Farmville may have been a little bit separate from that blue wave.”
For Democrat Mike Kondratick, who flipped a Republican mayoral seat in Holly Springs in Wake County, it’s really not about national politics at all. It’s more about listening, responding and being prepared.
By the time Election Day rolled around, Kondratick was on his third lap around town canvassing. People talked about traffic and development, as well as hearing from their government all the time, not just during campaign season.
He won by 11 percentage points, with nearly 30% turnout — an outlier for typically low turnout municipal elections.
Charlotte City Council Democratic candidate Kimberly Owens feels similarly.
Although her opponent, Republican incumbent Krista Bokhari, leaned into her Trump connection (her husband used to hold the District 6 seat before taking a job with the federal administration), Owens leaned the opposite direction.
“I started with, and stand by a presumption that local governance really should not break down along party lines,” she said. “It should be around finding somebody who has a skill set to get done the things that are important to you. And I think voters saw in me someone who was above some of the party games and parlor tricks.”
Owens won by 13 percentage points. She credits her campaign’s ground game and key endorsements for the win. But she acknowledged that Bokhari’s national connections didn’t hurt.
“I don’t know if it was as much that people wanted blue as much as they wanted new,” she said. “And for better or for worse, my opponent was associated with her husband and with an old approach to things that people felt wasn't really responsive to their needs.”
Looking forward
Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper would caution Democrats from drawing too many conclusions from the 2025 results.
Yes, there was a bit of a blue wave in the state, but municipal elections are inherently better for Democrats, he said. Not everyone is eligible to vote in municipal elections; you have to live in town, and increasingly, that’s where more liberal voters reside.
The electorate in 2026 will be quite different; it will be both exponentially larger with better turnout, and include the entire ideological spectrum of voters across the state.
“It was a good night for the Democrats,” Cooper said. “They should be happy. They should be bragging. That's what politicians do. But they shouldn't feel like they've got 2026 in the bag.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.