RALEIGH, North Carolina — Democrats have yet to wrest the prize in the swing state of North Carolina from Republicans in the presidential election, but have scored important down-ballot victories, giving them hope as they look to the future.
Despite Donald Trump’s victory by more than 3 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina, Democrats on Election Day celebrated their victories in races for governor, attorney general and legislature in a sharply divided state where conservatives have recently dominated the General Assembly and the courts. .
In an election with few bright spots for Democrats nationally, the trend of ticket-splitting among Tar Heel State voters offered some of that good news.
“I think we had quality candidates against right-wing extremists, and the people of North Carolina made the right choices,” said Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a Harris surrogate who was once seen as her potential nominee to the vice presidency. races.
Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, easily defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to succeed Cooper, who was ineligible to run again due to term limits. The campaign was dominated by Stein’s fundraising prowess and ads and social media targeting Robinson’s history of inflammatory statements on issues including abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Democrats have now won eight of the last nine North Carolina gubernatorial elections. In contrast, Republicans have won the state in 11 of the last 12 presidential elections, with Barack Obama in 2008 being the only exception.
In the race to succeed Stein as attorney general, U.S. Representative Jeff Jackson extended his winning streak in the 1900 Democratic elections by defeating U.S. Representative Dan Bishop. Democrats flipped both the lieutenant governor’s office and the public schools superintendent position — defeating, in the latter race, a Republican who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington before the attack on the U.S. Capitol and who called public schools “liberal indoctrination.” centers. »
State Democratic Party Chairman Anderson Clayton, the nation’s youngest at 26, is learning to embrace the positives while dealing with the headwinds Harris has faced at the top of the ticket.
“Everyone keeps calling us a positive,” she said. “And I say to myself: ‘We still lost the presidential race.'”
State Republicans can hang their hats for 2024 success on Trump’s third straight election victory and securing three additional congressional seats — the result of 2023 redistricting that led to Democratic incumbents failing to win. not get re-elected. These reversals were critical to national Republicans’ efforts to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
But in the state’s only congressional race, first-term Democratic Rep. Don Davis won narrowly. Even though the Republican Party has retained a veto-proof majority in the state Senate, it likely won’t be able to maintain one in the one-seat House, giving Stein a more robust veto. to roll back Republican legislation.
Ticket splitting in North Carolina has been going on for decades. Voters have long been comfortable with Democrats running state agencies, but less comfortable with the liberal wing of the national Democratic Party.
“People are unhappy and want to see changes at the federal level. They’re not as comfortable with this idea of change for the sake of it at the state level,” said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh.
Republican leaders in the state say their party is still doing well. They point out that they won five of 10 statewide executive branch offices, retained control of the General Assembly and continued to dominate recent statewide races. statewide appeal. However, the state Supreme Court race appears likely to result in a recount.
“There’s going to be a lot of talk about North Carolina being a purple state. You’ve all heard me say this before: North Carolina is a Republican state by default,” state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after the election.
Yet 2024 will be marked by missed GOP opportunities that some critics place at Robinson’s feet.
What was billed after the March primary as the most competitive gubernatorial race in the country never came to fruition; Stein won by nearly 15 percentage points. Robinson’s offer was outweighed by Stein’s 4-to-1 spending advantage through mid-October and a CNN report that Robinson had posted explicit sexual and racist statements on the forum a pornographic website over ten years ago.
Robinson denied writing the messages and eventually sued CNN. The case is pending. But the Republican Governors Association stopped running ads supporting him, most of his campaign staff resigned and Republicans distanced themselves. That included Trump, who endorsed Robinson before the March primaries and called him “Martin Luther King on steroids” but stopped appearing with him when Trump passed through North Carolina.
Stein’s campaign was comfortable enough to send a late $12 million to the state Democratic Party that helped other candidates, including General Assembly candidates who ran ads linking GOP rivals to Robinson.
“This could have been a historic race for the state of North Carolina, but it didn’t happen,” state House Majority Leader John Bell said in an interview. While giving Stein credit for his campaign, Bell added, “Our candidate for governor ran a very bad campaign.
Larry Shaheen, a longtime political consultant and now Republican Party fundraiser, wrote on X that without the work of party leaders, “the damage done to candidates because of Robinson would have been enormous.”
Some conservatives remained loyal to Robinson and blamed Republican officials who abandoned him for some poor election results. Robinson himself complained during the campaign about politicians on his side of the aisle saying that “when it’s hot in the kitchen and you turn around and look, they’re not there anymore.”
The next major electoral test will come in 2026, when Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis’s seat is up for re-election. Robinson did not rule out a future candidacy, which could include challenging Tillis in a primary. Among Democrats, Cooper has not publicly rejected a 2026 Senate bid, and outgoing U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, has said he is also considering one. Democrats have not won a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008.
Still, McLennan said, Democrats have given themselves something to build on.
“Democrats must be feeling pretty good,” he said. “But they still have a lot of work to do for 2026 and 2028.”
Clayton, the Democratic chairman, said the work starts now. That means recruiting candidates, starting with next year’s municipal elections, making sure incumbent candidates get the help they need, and reaching out to citizens across the state to lay the groundwork for future elections.
“We have to go back to basics,” she said.
