Obama won it in 2008 but since then it’s been stubbornly lean R.
Why? It’s diverse and fast growing with big cities and progressive communities full of young people, POC, immigrants, lgbtq, students and other left leaning groups.
It is really striking, isn't it? Especially since Democrats have actually gotten extremely huge swings in North Carolina cities, which are kind of underestimated since they haven't actually flipped any counties with it. In 2012, Mitt Romney won a huge swath of Mecklenburg County and Held Obama at 54% in Wake County; now Republicans have to fight to keep their seat in north Meck and are relegated to the quasi-rural zone of SE Wake in the state legislature.
The issue is that these places aren't that high a percentage of the population. NC is dominated demographically by small cities and large towns, which means you have a lot of very populous hyper-Republican counties.
This is actually a fairly common demographic pattern in the South; somewhere like the NC Foothills looks a lot like NW Georgia politically and demographically.
Getting over the hump in North Carolina will require some combination of stopping the bleeding in the rural Eastern part of the state -- which arguably caused Biden's loss in 2020 -- and continuing to consolidate support in cities. IMO the former is a bit more valuable because it means better things for Democrats in the NC Legislature, but the latter is probably easier since national Democrats seem to really want to go down a nasty neoliberal path.
