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Smith cited a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill report, “How Have Registered Voters in N.C. Shifted Demographically Over the Past Decade?” that found that “North Carolina has added nearly one million new registered voters since 2013. In that time span, there has been an increase of over 210,000 new Republican voters, a decrease of over 350,000 Democrats, and an increase of over 960,000 Unaffiliated voters.”
Jason Matthew Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, pointed out that ticket splitting, a practice in decline throughout most of the United States, remains a characteristic of North Carolina politics:
North Carolina voters do regularly split their tickets in statewide and national races. The current governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat who has managed to win two terms at the same time that the Republican presidential candidate won the state.
Given that, Roberts maintained,
It is not clear to me that nominees like Robinson and Morrow will necessarily help President Biden. It would not be at all surprising to see Robinson lose the governorship to Josh Stein, the current attorney general, while seeing Trump carry the state in the presidential contest.
Overall, Roberts contended in an email,
There are two countervailing political trends at work in North Carolina. The Research Triangle or the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and surrounding suburbs area is growing very rapidly, and it is also an area that is extremely well-educated. Nationwide, we are seeing more educated voters move toward the Democratic Party and you clearly see that in the Triangle and in Charlotte and its suburbs.
At the same time, a lot of rural voters who traditionally voted for Democrats statewide have started voting more Republican. So far the rural/Republican trend has counterbalanced the Triangle/Democratic trend and the Republicans have won more times than not in statewide races in recent years.
Anderson Clayton, the new chairman of the state Democratic Party, Roberts wrote, “ran on a platform of trying to reach more rural voters. This fall it will be an interesting test to see how effective that strategy has been, and to see if the growth trend has been able to overtake the rural trend.”
What is striking is how quickly and completely the North Carolina Republican Party has been taken over by MAGA Trump loyalists who, in turn, have repudiated the old guard.
Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, described the takeover in an email, citing the results of the state’s 2022 and 2024 primary elections.
With this year’s primary election, Trump captured three-quarters of the N.C. Republican primary vote, compared to Haley’s quarter. With that as a base line, you look at the gubernatorial contest, with Trump-endorsed Robinson garnering two-thirds of the primary vote, to one-third for Folwell and Graham, both the non-Trump candidates.
This is comparable to the 2022 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, where Trump-endorsed Ted Budd and Trump-aligned Mark Walker combined got two-thirds of the primary vote, while former governor Pat McCrory — the more “establishment” non-Trump Republican — got only a quarter of the vote.
So, Bitzer continued, “in my analysis, the North Carolina Republican Party — in terms of the party’s electorate, as an organization, and in its candidates and, in general, its elected officials — is the MAGA/Trump Republican Party of North Carolina.”
The Trumpification of the Republican Party has not led to its dominance. Bitzer pointed to the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won the state by 12 points while Democratic Gov. Mike Easley cruised to re-election, by the same margin.
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