A case study on purple North Carolina and blue Georgia

Democrats are optimistic going into the 2020 elections. Presumptive nominee Joe Biden has dominated the Democratic primaries since his decisive victory in South Carolina and has consistently held a narrow lead over incumbent Republican Donald Trump in opinion polls. Particularly exciting for Democrats is the possibility of a breakthrough in the south; suburban candidates in Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas all won hotly-contested elections in light red seats.

Reclaiming North Carolina at the presidential level is a key goal, but could turning Georgia blue actually be more likely? It’s not an impossible scenario. Looking underneath the surface in North Carolina and Georgia reveals the two states might have two different trajectories long-term – and that Georgia might be a more viable target earlier than some might think.

The swing tells the story

One way to see the stark differences in North Carolina and Georgia’s trends is to look at the swing. The two maps above compare the swings from 2008 to 2016 in both states. In North Carolina, the nine counties that swung towards the Democrats only represent around a third of the state’s population. In Georgia, however, the counties that have swung towards the Democrats represent over 55% of the population.

This stark difference can be traced to one factor: Atlanta. The city and its many suburbs are the dominant metropolitan area in Georgia and they are rapidly turning blue. Nearly 6.8 million people live in Atlanta’s Combined Statistical Area and that number grows every day.

In contrast, 65 of the state’s 159 counties have declining populations, with much of this coming from southern Georgia. Republicans have gained ground in most of these rural counties, even majority-minority ones, but they are hemorrhaging voters in the rapidly-growing suburbs.

North Carolina tells a different story. No single metropolitan area dominates it, and growth and decline have been spread across the entire state.

While the urban Democratic strongholds of Mecklenburg and Wake have seen massive increases in population, so have their staunchly Republican suburbs. Additionally, rural and exurban areas are often growing in population as well. This might not be a permanent solution, but it’s a completely viable long-term area of growth for Republicans to work and build on.

Gwinnett County: Ground zero for Georgia’s realignment

Gwinnett County, Georgia, which has a population of over 930,000 people, is an especially stark example of the GOP’s Georgia problem. In 2004, George W. Bush won it by a staggering 32 percentage points; John McCain and Mitt Romney would go on to win it by 10 and 9 points, respectively.

This sharp decline was due to increased Democratic votes, not a decline in the Republican vote. In 2016, however, Trump lost the county by 6 points and brought in nearly 13,000 fewer voters than Romney. In the 2018 gubernatorial election, which saw near-presidential level turnout, Democrat Stacey Abrams beat Republican Brian Kemp by 14 percentage points. Republican Rep. Rob Woodall, who represents much of the county in the House, only held his seat by 433 votes. The prospect of a Republican even running competitively here seems gone, as it does in much of the Atlanta suburbs. Gwinnett County is a blue county now and might be representative of a blue Georgia.

North Carolina lacks a Gwinnett County

In contrast to Georgia’s suburban revolt, North Carolina lacks any real comparison. While Democrats have made impressive and substantial gains in almost every urban county in the state, they have yet to even put a dent in most of the suburban counties. In fact, every single suburban county in the state voted for Donald Trump in 2016, most of them by very large margins. Additionally, these counties are continuing to grow, meaning they are providing additional Republican votes to counterbalance the growth of the urban centers.

A great example of this pattern is Union County, the largest suburban county in the state. This longtime Republican stronghold has a population of around 220,000 people. Rather than shift to the left, it has actually moved to the right since 2008. Trump won it by 30 percentage points in 2016, three more than McCain did in 2008. In fact, even some urban, Democratic-leaning urban counties like Forsyth and Cumberland have shifted a tad right since 2008.

Another example of Republican growth comes from the fastest-growing county in the state, Brunswick County. This coastal county saw population growth of 32.1% from 2010 to 2019. Economically tied to Wilmington, it has gone from mildly Republican to a stronghold in just a few elections. Trump won it by 28.4%, the best margin for a Republican there since Nixon’s landslide in 1972.

With a continuing influx of Republican-leaning retirees, Brunswick seems more than capable of counterbalancing any shifts in the neighboring urban county of New Hanover. This balancing act has progressed across the entire state and has led to a fairly stable, albeit narrow, Republican advantage.

Rural, white North Carolina is the ace in the GOP hole

Making things more interesting for North Carolina Republicans is a large untapped rural vote throughout the state. Racial polarization in the south is no joke. In the deep south, Republicans won rural whites by a staggering margin of 81% to 17%. Georgia reflects this; the reason Republican growth seems minimal there is that they are already approaching this margin in basically every rural county. The white vote in North Carolina, however, is still fairly competitive.

Statistically, we can show just how much more racially polarized Georgia is than North Carolina by performing a simple linear regression between the white percentage of a precinct’s voting-age population (VAP) and Trump’s margin as a percentage of votes cast in the precinct for all precincts in both states. VAP is more useful for this purpose than total population because it only includes those over 18. Admittedly though, VAP is imperfect because it is from 2010 in both states and includes non-citizens, incarcerated persons, and persons on parole or probation, all of whom are ineligible to vote in both states.

In Georgia, 79.16% of variance in Trump’s margin is explained by the white percentage of the VAP. By contrast, in North Carolina, only 60.46% of variance is explained by the white percentage of the VAP. This would indicate that voting in Georgia is far more racially polarized than in North Carolina. Moreover, the line of best fit in Georgia indicates that a 1% increase in the white population of a precinct results in approximately a 1.69 point increase in Trump’s margin. In North Carolina, a 1% increase in the white population of a precinct only results in approximately a 1.39 point increase in Trump’s margin. This further shows Georgia’s stronger racial polarization.

Finally, in a more “back of the napkin” way of looking at it, a scattergram of precinct data in both states shows Georgia’s stronger racial polarization just through visual inspection. In both images, the x-axis is the white voting age population of a precinct, and the y-axis is Trump’s margin as a percentage of total votes in a precinct.

The untapped rural vote

Donald Trump received over 80% of the vote in 23 counties in Georgia. These counties had white populations ranging from around 60% in Echols to nearly 95% in Fannin. In North Carolina, however, Trump’s best county (Graham) awarded him only 78% of the vote. The whitest county in the state, Madison, gave him only 60% of the vote. Much of this is due to ancestral Democrats in the border counties of Asheville and the east.

Democratic vote shares in these areas have cratered and are showing no signs of stopping any time soon. Assuming 80% as a reasonable target in the whitest counties, Republicans actually have a lot of untapped votes they can make up. This isn’t even counting the eastern part of the state. While eastern North Carolina, like southern Georgia, is racially diverse, Republicans still have a lot of room to grow. Recent elections have seen Republicans make exponential gains across almost all of the east. Republicans have even improved dramatically in their performance among the Lumbee tribe, who are mainly based around Robeson county. Finally, it helps Republicans that most of the Democratic-leaning counties in the northeast have seen population declines.

Conclusion

Conventional wisdom holds that North Carolina is trending Democratic and is a ticking time bomb for Republicans, but this hasn’t borne out in reality. While Colorado and Virginia turned blue in 2008 and haven’t looked back, North Carolina has returned to the Republican column in the last two presidential elections despite Romney and Trump losing the national popular vote. Looking below the surface shows a state with a stable political climate that should remain competitive for years to come.

In contrast, Georgia seems increasingly like a looming disaster for Republicans. As Kraz Greinetz explained his earlier article for Elections Daily, Republicans have a major problem. They have basically reached their peak with white rural voters and are losing ground rapidly in the Atlanta suburbs. Unlike in North Carolina, Atlanta is the dominant metropolitan area in Georgia and is rapidly growing.

Atlanta’s dominance recalls what happened with the Denver suburbs in Colorado and the DC suburbs in northern Virginia. Once these crucial areas flipped, the fate of Republicans was sealed. If the Georgia Republican Party keeps losing ground in the Atlanta suburbs, the rise of a blue Georgia seems inevitable. If current trends continue, the question isn’t if Georgia flips – it’s when.