North Carolina 2020 Redistricting

[Tekken_Guy]

New Hanover County is the kind of place which seems like it should be much more Democratic than it is to the outside observer; despite being arguably the most urbanized of the group it's easily the most right wing major metro county in the state.

This actually kind of gets to the heart of the matter of NC geography. There's been a lot of discourse about the "countrypolitan" counties of North Carolina and their importance to the future prospects of the NC Democratic party, but imo a lot of that comes from a category misunderstanding about them.

Since North Carolina only really has mid-sized cities, the lens of comparison for them is often larger cities, but that often confuses the issue, by making outer suburban and exurban counties seem comparable to inner suburban counties elsewhere. For example, people will say that Democrats should try to build up strength in Union County (which they should!), with the goal of flipping it. But this ignores the fact that very few places like Union County vote Democratic, basically none in the South. Union County is outer suburbia, going on exurbia; the relevant comparison is Cherokee or Coweta in Atlanta.

The Research Triangle is even more striking; Democrats in the past few years have been doing extremely well in far out areas of Wake County, winning precincts in places like Holly Springs or Fuquay-Varina; basically the equivalent of Democrats winning Forsyth County in Georgia in terms of urban structure. Biden even got decent numbers in Clayton in Johnston County.

It's also important to spell out: these communities have a lot of ideological right-wingers! It was very noticeable that most of the earliest CRT/anti-LGBT educational panic organizing was in places with these sorts of profiles: New Hanover County, Union County, Moore County (which is not part of a major MSA but is similar demographically).

Democrats should obviously try to improve their margins in places like these, and they may be buoyed up by growth and demographic change in certain cases--I'm thinking of Franklin, Alamance, Cabarrus, and NW Johnston in particular.

But I do think that psephologists place too much of an emphasis on winning over voters in in Republican suburban and exurban areas, at the expense of stopping the bleeding in rural Eastern NC, which is ultimately the big problem for Democrats in the state. The NC Democrats are already punching well above their weight in large metro areas!

North Carolina doesn’t really have a lot of people in the eastern part of the state, so they can easily offset that with urban and suburban growth.

[Tekken_Guy]

North Carolina doesn’t really have a lot of people in the eastern part of the state, so they can easily offset that with urban and suburban growth.

I mean, this is just not true. On a fair map, there'd be around 3 districts in Eastern NC; if you include a district based in the Sandhills, which have similar dynamics, you'd get 4. That's like 20-30% of the state's population! Eastern NC may lack large metro centers, with the most sizable being Fayetteville and Wilmington, but the region has a bunch of small cities that add up--Rocky Mount, Goldsboro, Wilson, Greenville, Elizabeth City, etc. etc.
 
The kinds of places which I was discussing are a much smaller fraction of the state.

And the left trending parts of the state are way larger and will overpower the gains made in the metros.