Should democrats give up on NC and focus elsewhere?

[AN63093]

Give up on?  No.

However, at some point, your money is going to be more efficiently spent elsewhere.  And if the Dems somehow find themselves in a position where it's basically NC or bust, then something has gone horribly awry.

That being said, NC is a state that is winnable for the Dems.  Unlike, for example, VA, which absent a landslide, is not voting R.  Every dollar the GOP spends there is about as useful as throwing it in a fire.

[AN63093]

I don't think that even had Trump won the PV, he would've won VA.  The fact that the country as a whole swung R 1.76%, and yet VA still swung D anyway (for a trend of D+3%) is good evidence of this.  If Trump had managed to pull off a PV victory, those votes weren't going to be coming from VA.

VA is deceptive because it has a high GOP floor, is very polarized, and there are still lots of Republicans in the western areas of the state.  But getting those last few % are next to impossible in the current climate.  The GOP needs to find over 200k more votes, and I don't know where they find them.  Even in a place where there are potentially more GOP voters, like say, VA Beach, it's not enough.  VA Beach could go back to Bush level margins and it still wouldn't close the gap.  The simple fact is that NoVA has seen so much growth, and for the most part, these people moving in are all Dems, that the state is beyond reach for the GOP right now.  Maybe not in the future, but that's the situation currently.

I was being somewhat hyperbolic when I said they should spend $0, but I wasn't exaggerating much.  For every dollar the GOP spends here, there is almost certainly a more efficient and productive place to spend the money.

Romney is a completely different situation... you're comparing apples and oranges.  Romney was never in serious striking distance of Obama, no matter where he spent the money.  The only reason he seemed to superficially be competitive is because the media covered him in a more favorable and positive way, whereas Trump was despised by the media, the establishment, pretty much every political writer out there from all sides.  So it gives a distorted picture to the observer of what was really going on in terms of win probability.  In reality, Romney was never really in it, whereas Trump was (and is, for 2020).