North Carolina geography is strange

[Unelectable Bystander]

Does anybody else feel that the map of a usual NC result is quite strange? Several things stand out to me:

1) The number of counties that Dems win and the margins they receive in cities would indicate a Dem win at first glance. Charlotte seems to vote closer to a Dallas/Detroit than Nashville/Houston/Phoenix etc which is surprising to me. Raleigh and Durham produce a ton of net votes. Even places like Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Fayetteville are won comfortably by D’s, when it feels like similar sized metros are competitive or easily red in places like SC and TN.

2) Despite it’s high percentage of rural population, the net votes for R’s in rural counties don’t seem very large and are partially negated by the northeast part of the state.

3) A huge amount of the R margins come from a few larger “small towns”, the Wilmington metro, and a few suburban counties. It doesn’t look like a typical R coalition, as so many of the net votes come from only a few counties.

[ProgressiveModerate]

You make good points. These would be my responses to all 3:

1. NC really lacks a singular large metro unlike most swing states (Atlanta, Pheonix, Detroit, Philly, ect). This means while even if the metros are decently liberal themselves, you don't get a situation where you have precincts and precincts of heavily D black population or significant population of hyper D liberals in downtown. Greensboro, Winston Salem, and Fayetteville all have results that make sense when you look at how metros in VA to the north and SC to the South vote, and rmbr, all 3 of these cities have notable black populations.

2/3. The R coalition in NC is very one much of exurbanism and denser rurals. I can't understate how dense the Appalachia part of NC is; consistently having "rural" counties netting you over 15k votes is really powerful. In the eastern part of the state, the rural areas are much less dense and are scattered with black communities making them much less powerful in contributing to the GOP.

Politically and demographically, ig NC is simillar to a hypothetical unified VA; a competative state with a handful of liberal cities/metros and a bunch of hyper R rurals inland.

Topline, the states results make sense for this reason.

[If my soul was made of stone]

The idea that Democratic performances and coalitions in Charlotte, Dallas, and Detroit have anything in common is giving me an aneurysm. It wasn't that long ago that Pat McCrory was Charlotte's Moderate Nice Guy Republican Mayor who held Bev Perdue below 50% in Mecklenburg County even as she was winning parts of the state that had been sprinting away from national Democrats since Jesse Helms was a Senate freshman. The "Wedge" of affluent white suburbs in southeastern Mecklenburg has only shifted significantly Dem in the time that the state's unusually high rural white Dem floor began crumbling and continued conservative migration into the exurbs became enough to offset it, and before then had been the coup de grace for a number of statewide Republican victories (most notably Tillis in 2014). Even now, Charlotte proper is still plurality-white by VAP.

Vacant white exurban no man's land is what keeps the state narrowly tilting Republican, as it is with most states despite the obsession of folks like us with rural-bashing. Cape Fear outside of Wilmington itself, and extending up the coast towards Jacksonville, Beaufort, etc, attracts the same type of conservative retiree as neighboring Myrtle Beach, in about equal numbers to bobo Relocated Yankees flooding into their Containment Area. Between Asheville, Charlotte, and the Piedmont Triad (Lexington, Salisbury, Statesville, etc) lies the "what is this a suburb of" morass of death that typified the old east-west divide on both barbecue and partisanship and still collectively provides handsome raw votes. Even in Butterfieldland, many smaller Black cities such as Goldsboro and Kinston are outvoted by their white environs, and others are so narrowly divided as to provide very few Dem raw votes (Wilson, the white half of greater Rocky Mount). Dems haven't yet stopped falling in many of these places, either; Obama carried the state on an abnormally-high-for-the-21st-century-South floor easing what would now be considered anemic margins in the big metros.

[Skill and Chance]

You make good points. These would be my responses to all 3:

1. NC really lacks a singular large metro unlike most swing states (Atlanta, Pheonix, Detroit, Philly, ect). This means while even if the metros are decently liberal themselves, you don't get a situation where you have precincts and precincts of heavily D black population or significant population of hyper D liberals in downtown. Greensboro, Winston Salem, and Fayetteville all have results that make sense when you look at how metros in VA to the north and SC to the South vote, and rmbr, all 3 of these cities have notable black populations.

2/3. The R coalition in NC is very one much of exurbanism and denser rurals. I can't understate how dense the Appalachia part of NC is; consistently having "rural" counties netting you over 15k votes is really powerful. In the eastern part of the state, the rural areas are much less dense and are scattered with black communities making them much less powerful in contributing to the GOP.

Politically and demographically, ig NC is simillar to a hypothetical unified VA; a competative state with a handful of liberal cities/metros and a bunch of hyper R rurals inland.

Topline, the states results make sense for this reason.

Yes.  Fundamentally, it's that area north and west of Charlotte being as R as the cities are D that saves Republicans in NC.

[Sol]

Lot of good answers here. Fundamentally, North Carolina has an extremely even population distribution, with a lot of small cities and big towns, so (the fairly recent) Republican weakness in NC's major cities doesn't really matter.

Historically, this is the result of the state being something of an industrial region with factories in most small towns; it's similar to the kind of population distribution you get in Ohio or Upstate New York.

North Carolina political geography is kind of hard to explain without taking into account topography; in essence, like a lot of other Southeastern states NC has a threefold division between the Mountains in the west, the Piedmont in the center (which ends east of Raleigh and east/south of Fayetteville), and the Coastal Plains in the East. The Coastal Plains are pretty quintessential lowland south and don't take too much explaining; the Appalachians are also pretty straightforward, though they have some political quirks.

The Piedmont is a bit different; it's not mountainous but rather a region of low rolling hills. It was reasonably suitable for agriculture but less so for large-scale plantation agriculture, which meant that there was a smaller enslaved population and consequently a smaller and more urban Black population now. This is why places like Davidson County are so Republican; the Black population is pretty small outside of the town centers. The Piedmont became the most industrialized region of the Southeast in the early 20th century as unions and lower labor costs moved factories to the South, which made much of the towns somewhat large places (there's also substantial industry in much of the coastal plains too). The Piedmont also has an above average population relative to the coastal plains for reasons I don't quite understand but which seems to obtain across much of the south; the population always falls off around the Fall Line.

Although this threefold division is probably the most pronounced in North Carolina, it extends along the eastern seaboard, but where the line goes between the regions is not always obvious because it's not straight, instead paralleling the Appalachians. Asheville is a city of the mountains but Greenville is a city of the Piedmont; Fayetteville's obvious counterparts are Columbia or Augusta. If you get the parallels right usually most NC cities will make sense, the exceptions being the Triangle, which votes to the left of most Southern cities due to highly educated transplants, and Asheville, which votes to the left of most Southern cities due to being a magnet for hippie transplants.

Had trouble finding a good map of the regions of North Carolina that would be good to share without copyright issues, but if you google this stuff there are lots of good maps.

2/3. The R coalition in NC is very one much of exurbanism and denser rurals. I can't understate how dense the Appalachia part of NC is; consistently having "rural" counties netting you over 15k votes is really powerful. In the eastern part of the state, the rural areas are much less dense and are scattered with black communities making them much less powerful in contributing to the GOP.

FWIW the truly Appalachian parts of North Carolina are not actually that populous; on 2010 numbers at least you could fit nearly all of them in 1 congressional district. The Foothills (aka the part of the Piedmont between the Appalachians and Winston-Salem/Charlotte) aren't usually considered to be part of the Mountains though they do have some outlying low ranges. But yeah, the Republican vote in the state does rely a lot on the densely populated and industrial towns in that area, like Hickory, Wilkesboro, etc.

[TML]

Earlier this year, a paper published by researchers at Duke University noted that 28 counties on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas - which these researchers dubbed "Countrypolitan" counties - are mainly responsible for sustaining the state's R lean. They are as follows:

Anson County
Brunswick County
Cabarrus County
Camden County
Chatham County
Currituck County
Davidson County
Davie County
Franklin County
Gaston County
Gates County
Granville County
Harnett County
Haywood County
Henderson County
Hoke County
Iredell County
Johnston County
Lincoln County
Madison County
Pender County
Person County
Rockingham County
Randolph County
Rowan County
Stokes County
Union County
Yadkin County

Of these 28 counties, Trump won 25 of them in 2020 while Biden won only 3 (Anson, Chatham, and Hoke). Anson and Hoke are "minority coalition" counties (i.e. counties where the combined population of non-whites exceed that of non-Hispanic whites), while Chatham County has many highly-educated voters. The other 25 counties are all whiter and less educated than the state at-large, and this enabled Trump to win all but two of them (Cabarrus and Granville) by double digits (and 20 of them by at least 20 points). In total, Trump won these "Countrypolitan" counties by 407K votes, whereas he only won the 62 small-city and rural counties by 352K votes (whereas Biden won the 10 big-city counties - Buncombe, Cumberland, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, New Hanover, Orange, Pitt, and Wake - by 685K votes).

According to the Duke researchers, Democrats can flip NC by reducing their losing margins in these "Countrypolitan" counties. Geographically speaking, there are two main areas where they can accomplish this:

-The areas closest to the major city centers, which are most urban/suburban;
-"Blue outposts" within these counties, which are typically the most populous municipalities and/or the county seats of these counties (e.g. Monroe in Union County, Gastonia in Gaston County, Reidsville in Rockingham County, Hendersonville in Henderson County, etc.).

What Democrats can and should do is to increase turnout in the "blue outposts" listed above, as well as in the most urban/suburban areas closest to the big city centers.