Democrats keep losing in North Carolina. Their strategy might be the problem.
In the end, 2022 proved to be another disappointing year for Democrats in North Carolina, despite hopes that Cheri Beasley might bring the party its first U.S. Senate win in 15 years.
Not only did Republicans succeed in sending Ted Budd to Washington, they picked up several seats in the state legislature — landing a supermajority in the Senate and a near supermajority in the House. Republicans also swept statewide judicial races, including two seats on the N.C. Supreme Court.
“It was hard not to wake up with a now-familiar feeling of Democrats faring relatively well nationally, but falling short in North Carolina,” Asher Hildebrand, a Duke University professor and former chief of staff for retiring Rep. David Price, told me. “In fact, it was very much the feeling we woke up with after the 2020 election as well.”
It could have been worse. But it’s still a frustrating result for North Carolina Democrats, who have spent years chasing victories that, for the most part, remain just out of reach.
It’s not hard to figure out why. While Democratic support has thrived in North Carolina’s rapidly growing urban areas, the party has continually struggled to make inroads in other parts of the state.
The ‘countrypolitan’ problem
One explanation is what longtime Democratic strategist Mac McCorkle, now a professor at Duke University, calls the “countrypolitan problem.”
McCorkle is referring to counties that are a hybrid of urban and rural — they border major metropolitan areas, but retain many small-town dynamics. Key examples include Johnston County in the Triangle and Union County near Charlotte. Many of them are fast-growing exurbs whose residents commute to work in the larger cities.
There’s evidence of Democrats making progress in these areas. Diamond Staton-Williams leads in a competitive N.C. House race in Cabarrus County by just a few hundred votes. Cabarrus County’s growth is primarily fueled by people of color. Wiley Nickel defied expectations in a swing district that includes all of Johnston County.
Still, Budd routed Beasley in both Johnston and Cabarrus counties, earning as large of a vote share as Donald Trump did in 2020. Anson County, another county that McCorkle classifies as countrypolitan, was carried by Joe Biden in 2020 but flipped to Budd in 2022.
“The acid test for the Democrats is in these countrypolitan areas,” McCorkle said. “Republicans are still winning those counties by 20 points or more. And until the Democrats start to crack that number, they’re always going to be behind the eight ball.”
The rural problem
The other problem for Democrats in North Carolina lies in rural areas, which in many cases are only trending more Republican.
“Democrats tend to believe rural areas are out of reach, so they don’t go there,” Democratic strategist Douglas Wilson, who sits on the board of directors for the New Rural Project, said. Wilson pointed out that a handful of Democratic incumbents from rural counties lost re-election to the state legislature this year, including James Gailliard in Nash County and Linda Cooper-Suggs in Wilson County.
“Our strategy of going big in urban areas and hoping for the best, it’s just not going to work,” Wilson said. “We need to go into these rural areas, but knowing that it’s going to take time. It may take a decade, but we have to keep going there.”
The majority of North Carolina’s 100 counties are not ones that Democrats have much chance of winning outright, at least not anytime soon. But they don’t necessarily have to, at least not in statewide races — they just have to lose by narrower margins.
According to unofficial results, Beasley underperformed Biden’s 2020 vote share in most rural counties. Some rural counties that Biden carried in 2020 voted for Budd this year, including Nash County (where Gov. Roy Cooper is from) and Pasquotank County. That’s not at all unexpected in a difficult midterm year — but it’s not enough to win, either. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats flipped a Senate seat this year, John Fetterman outperformed Biden in almost every county, including rural areas.
Beasley’s campaign, to its credit, did a much better job of reaching out to voters in rural counties than Democrats have in recent years. And grassroots organizations, such as Down Home North Carolina and the New Rural Project, have been organizing where the party apparatus has not, but they can’t do it alone.
“There has been a lot of talk from the national party about the need to invest in local organizing,” Hildebrand said. “But that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t happened on a statewide level in the way that it needs to.”
What now?
In some ways, the Democrats’ biggest problem might be complacency. There seems to be a belief that North Carolina will become bluer on its own — that as the state becomes larger and more diverse, it will eventually give Democrats a majority of the vote. But Democrats have been saying that for years, and it hasn’t happened yet.
“Whether demography is destiny is an open question, but if it is, it’s happening on a timeframe in which a lot of damage can be done in the meantime,” Hildebrand said.
Knocking on doors and registering voters when a major election rolls around is important, but it’s not the way to achieve long-term success. If Democrats want to win in North Carolina, they’re going to have to start laying permanent infrastructure in counties they have too often ignored. That means empowering communities, recruiting candidates for local office and investing resources year-round. It also means having a message that resonates with voters in those communities — understanding their unique concerns about everything from the economy to health care, and having a plan to address them.
“You’ve got to have good turnout, got to have good mobilization of votes, but it just seems so obvious to me,” McCorkle said. “We’ve got to expand the range of Democratic voting in the state.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Democrats keep losing in North Carolina. Their strategy might be the problem.."
