The state has countervailing trends, and a mix of R-favoring population growth and shifts kept it from budging or flipping.
Population growth used to be very urban-heavy and now the retiree/recreational part of it has grown in importance. Mid-sized R counties have also grown and their raw vote margins are expanding quicker than they're shifting left.
Randolph(Triad exurbs), Davidson(Triad exurbs), Brunswick(retirees) and Johnston(Raleigh exurbs) counties are star examples.
The other part is that general trends make margins tight but probably benefit Republicans in the end. NC cities are already deeply blue, their turnout is good and their immediate suburbs vote how they should given their demographics, but Democratic victory in the state remains contingent on a high floor with rural whites and maintaining a near-hegemony over minority voters.
Obama '08 was able to barely accomplish this and NCDEMs can at times manage as well, but Republican inroads with blue collar voters across races generally complicate any Democratic gains elsewhere, as NC as a whole is more rural and less educated then other swing states. It's more comparable to the Midwest or Florida then VA, GA or AZ. If Biden was going to win here, he would've had to do a smidge better with non-college whites like he had in PA or MI. Cooper and Stein did it.
Probably the retiree influx? That fits with SC's swing also being more modest than expected.
There's also the Lumbee areas, which are unique to NC vs. the rest of the South and moved strongly toward Trump.
It also looks like there was some degree of disappointment with Trump in super red Appalachian areas, but I struggle to explain this.
Swings to Biden are pretty strongly correlated with areas heavy with retirees, especially outside of major metros!
The answer is 100% down to the general Biden underperformance in rural parts of the state, which is imo a combo of a swing to Trump among farmers (also observable in the rural midwest), slight swings to Trump among Black and to a lesser extent Latino voters, and the asymptote of rural southern white democrats dying out.
Definitely agree about the rest but look below about retirees. A small hit to the margin is fine for Republicans when these are some of the fastest growing parts of the state. Moore county, the Outer Banks and other areas are similar.
https://twitter.com/JMilesColeman/status/1355222571051048963?s=20
