I have always felt like the 2016 results in NC seemed a bit weird considering Clinton performed decently in other simillar sunbelt states like VA, GA, FL, TX, and AZ.
VA trended 3 points to the left, GA trended 5 points to the left, TX trended 10 points to the left in 2016, yet NC was static. What a weird result 2016 was in NC. The research triangle is booming, and is growing faster than Atlanta.
I don't think our results were that anomalous when you look at the bigger picture. The Triangle, while we're rapidly growing we do not dominate the state in the same fashion as the Atlanta metro. Additionally there's countertrends to consider, Obama was doing far better with uneducated whites in North Carolina than he was in Georgia or Texas.
Consider Yancey County, which went from McCain +6 -> Romney +14 -> Trump +32. The collapse in uneducated white support was easily enough to cancel out any swing towards Clinton from educated whites.
One final thing with the stagnation of trends in North Carolina, broadly I would expect it to continue, growth in North Carolina is not nearly as one sided as say Georgia. Many non-metro counties in NC are still growing appreciably. Look at fast-growing Brunswick County in the Southeast part of the state. While it cast 11k more votes in 2016 than 2012 this was not to Clinton's advantage as Trump's vote count totaled 8k more than Romney's while Clinton only gained 1k over Obama.
Looking to this election for a moment, I think we'll probably vote for Joe this go around, but if we do it's not a result of trends in the same fashion as Georgia or Texas. An average of Biden and Trump's performance among racial demographics in all polls taken since the convention (converting this to a two-party vote) shows Biden making a 16% gain over Clinton among uneducated whites, vs. a 2% loss with educated whites. Now I'm not sure I believe that latter bit and it's certainly possible that the Center for American Progress' educated white number for Clinton was too high. But even accounting for that, it seems NC's shifts in racial demographics have far more in common with Iowa or Wisconsin (whose polls tend to show larger gains for Biden among uneducated whites than educated) than Georgia (which shows most Democratic inroads coming from educated whites).
