Western North Carolina -- Many of the counties in this region are much less Republican than you see in other rural areas of Southern Appalachia. They also aren't swinging R by much, so there appears to be no reversion to the mean.
Western NC being less hyper-R is the result of a couple factors:
- Asheville is a very bohemian city, with a lot of hippies. There's overspill from that in surrounding areas to a certain extent, though important not to overstate.
- There are colleges in Boone (Watauga), Asheville, and Cullowhee (Jackson), which have dramatically influenced the politics of those areas.
- There's the Qualla Boundary in Jackson and Swain counties, including the Snowbird community in Graham County.
- WNC gets a lot of tourism from Florida because of the scenery and its cooler, seasonally variant climate. A lot of retirees have moved to the area. These people are fairly Republican, but not as much as the locals in some areas. A few places, like Asheville and Hendersonville, attract hippie retirees. The 2020 swings in WNC are a good proxy for this stuff.
- Moreso than Eastern Tennessee, there are parts of WNC which are ancestrally Democratic, and most of the Republican counties excluding Avery, Mitchell, and Madison were winnable for Democrats in a good year in the early 20th century. The 1950s-1970s saw a weakening of the deeply entrenched 19th century voting patterns in much of the South as the older generation started dying out. The obvious example of this is the Southern Strategy, but in historically Republican parts of the South Democrats became increasingly competitive, with their redistributive message resonating in poor places. The quintessential example in WNC is the Ponder Machine in Madison County, which flipped the area in the mid-1950s, but there are a lot of examples of this. There's more discussion of this here and here.
