Why was North Carolina Bernie's best state in the Old Confederacy?

[DINGO Joe]

Closed primaries: there are lots of ancestral Democrats, Dixiecrats & otherwise federal R voters locked into voting D because of party reg, particularly in western NC. It's the same reason he did so well in WV, KY, OK, etc.

WNC ain't like WV, OK, or KY.  Those are real granola eating birkenstock wearing people until you get past Jackson Co.  Buncombe is pretty liberal on every level now and there are wealthy retirees south of there.  Plus many of he mountain counties have a R history and the Ds are really D.  The housing is pretty expensive (and not in trailer parks)  and the rate of college degree attainment is pretty high. 

[DINGO Joe]

Closed primaries: there are lots of ancestral Democrats, Dixiecrats & otherwise federal R voters locked into voting D because of party reg, particularly in western NC. It's the same reason he did so well in WV, KY, OK, etc.

WNC ain't like WV, OK, or KY.  Those are real granola eating birkenstock wearing people until you get past Jackson Co.  Buncombe is pretty liberal on every level now and there are wealthy retirees south of there.  Plus many of he mountain counties have a R history and the Ds are really D.  The housing is pretty expensive (and not in trailer parks)  and the rate of college degree attainment is pretty high. 

Yes and no. That's true of southwestern NC to a far greater extent than the NW part. Ashe, Alleghany, Avery, Mitchell, Yancey counties are as redneck as anywhere in West V. It's really the Brevard-Hendersonville-Asheville-Boone corridor that is heavy on Yankee retirees and hippies.

I agree, there are rednecky parts, but there are also ancestral Republican areas that keep their influence on a D primary vote minimal especially compared to WV or OK (KY is a little more complicated)

[DINGO Joe]

The stretch of counties from Jackson to Polk have college educated rates of 30% or higher though they are quite old also.  There are lots of old people in rural WV, OK, and KY but nothing approaching that level of college education.  There is also less reliance on resource extraction in WNC than those other states and in fact more outdoor recreation opportunities in WNC.  They aren't diverse and they are old, but WNC skewed towards Bernie for different reasons  than  the aforementioned states.

[DINGO Joe]

Well, undiscussed among the counties is scale, as Buncombe cast 50,000 votes in the D primary (with Bernie winning 62%) vs  8400 in Haywood (with Bernie winning w/46%) and 1600 in Swain (Bernie 51%).  Even the Historically R county of Henderson cast more than 10,000 D votes because of it's size.  Basically the difference in WNC is Buncombe and the fact that it does bleeds into surrounding areas, combined with other institutions that reinforce it.  It makes the region more dynamic than any of the aforemention comparisons. 

The map of NC counties by % of college educated is kind of interesting too as the level of college education drops off a cliff immediately east of Buncombe, through most of the ancestral Republican part of the state (though to lowest % part of the state is in the old Jessecrat region in ENC that hasn't been overrun by sprawl or retirees)

An interesting comparison would be the only 2018 statewide race in NC with only two candidates, the NC Court of Appeals Seat 1 which John Arrowood won with 50.8% of the vote and became the first openly gay judge in the state.  Comparing his victory to Cooper's he had to follow the Stacey Abrams path of doing better in the urban-suburban areas to make up for a decline in much of the rural parts of the state, though again his vote held up well (or exceeded Cooper) in most of the counties around Buncombe.  Education level really mirrored swing in this race extremely well.