North Carolina Democrats were a rare case of success in an election otherwise devastating for the party.
Republicans won the government trifecta on Nov. 5, with President-elect Donald Trump winning the popular vote in a first for a Republican since 2004. Trump also won the swing state of North Carolina for the third time in a row, this time by over 3 percentage points. However, Republican victories in the state largely ended there, as Democrats won the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, and state legislature.
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Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC), whose successor, Attorney General Josh Stein, handily won his bid for governor over the scandal-plagued Republican Mark Robinson, credited the victories with “quality candidates.”
“I think we had quality candidates running for office against right-wing extremists, and the people of North Carolina made the right choices,” he said.
Democrats have a history of non-presidential victories in the swing state, winning eight of the past nine gubernatorial elections. Republicans have won 11 of the past 12 presidential elections, the one exception being 2008.
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The most easily explainable Democratic win was in the gubernatorial election, where a bombshell article from CNN a month before the election revealed that Robinson had called himself a “black nazi” and made other controversial remarks on a pornographic site years back.
“Mark Robinson was such a, what we would call in political science, such a flawed candidate that it would’ve been impossible for him to have garnered the same kind of enthusiasm that Trump did in North Carolina,” said Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College.
North Carolina voters were also not persuaded by the Democrats’ national strategy of portraying Republicans as extremists in contrast with their own centrism, which largely failed.
“You have a number of voters in North Carolina who tend to think that national Democratic candidates are too liberal but are more willing to support more moderate local candidates,” said Eric Heberlig, a political science professor at UNC Charlotte.
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David McLeannan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, said that the discrepancy between the national and state races reflects North Carolinians’ unique view of politics.
“People are unhappy and want to see change at the federal level. They’re not quite as comfortable with that idea of change for change’s sake at the state level,” he said.
