Summary:
- North Carolina’s population has changed greatly since 2020
- Hundreds of thousands of brand new voters will be voting here in November
- Republicans have effectively surrendered Wake, Mecklenburg and Durham counties
North Carolina is a state undergoing a rapid transition. The state’s strong economy, central geographic location and good weather has attracted newcomers for many decades, whether it’s for school, work, family or retirement. Combined with the state’s natural population growth and baseline demographics, this has combined to make the Old North State highly competitive politically and potentially a decisive prize in the 2024 Presidential election. Simply put, the electorate of North Carolina in 2024 itself is meaningfully different than it was just four years ago.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, North Carolina has gained about 396,000 new residents since 2020. Nearly all (95%) of this growth has been from net in-migration – people moving to North Carolina. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the top state sending new residents to North Carolina is Florida, followed by New York, Virginia and South Carolina, in that order. According to the NC State Board of Elections, there are over 217,000 more registered voters in the state today than there were during the 2020 election, and many more than that are net-new – in other words, voters who were not registered here four years ago.
In other words, a huge number – several hundred thousand – of the voters who will go to the polls in North Carolina this fall will be doing so in our state for the very first time.
In 2020, Donald Trump scraped out a narrow win in North Carolina by about 73,000 votes out of approximately 5.5 million cast. It was Trump’s narrowest margin of victory in any state, and has made North Carolina a tantalizing target not just for the Harris campaign, but for Democrats running statewide all the way down the ticket. What impact could this natural churn in North Carolina’s voter rolls have on the 2024 election?
Where the people are going
The first rule for understanding any electorate is simple: where are the voters?
As of the latest data available (mid-2023), 82 counties across our state have gained in population since 2020, while 18 lost some. Most of these population changes were fairly minor: 35 counties gained less than 1,000 new residents, and 25 counties gained between 1,000 and 5,000. Most population gains were heavily concentrated in urban counties.
Following a long-established pattern, just 7 counties accounted for half of all population growth in the state during this period. Wake and Mecklenburg alone accounted for more than a quarter (27%), at 106,000 collectively. This doesn't come as a major surprise, given that many people move to North Carolina to pursue the job opportunities these metro areas offer.
Thus, most of the population growth occurring in North Carolina is accruing to a small number of fast-growing urban and suburban counties, with Wake and Mecklenburg by far the leaders.
North Carolina's ongoing realignment
Voters in North Carolina are undergoing a steady political realignment. This has been happening for many years, but the chaos of the Trump-MAGA era has greatly accelerated it. While the MAGA-fied Republican party has thrilled hardcore conservatives, it has triggered an exodus from the party by a diverse cross-section of suburban voters, both across North Carolina and nationwide. We have written about this phenomenon many times before, and it is plain in the data. From 2016 to 2020, the counties above gaining the most in population have also swung significantly towards Democrats. In terms of the percentage point movement of the two-party vote share in each county towards the Democratic candidate:
- Wake: +6.2%
- Mecklenburg: +5.6%
- Johnston: +6%
- Brunswick: +3.4%
- Union: +6.5%
- Cabarrus: +10.1%
- New Hanover: +6%
- Iredell: +4%
- Durham: +2.8%
These are not trivial shifts. The 6.2 percentage-point shift in Wake county from 2016 to 2020 meant a whopping 57,622 additional marginal votes (eg. votes in excess of the opponent) for Joe Biden that year. In 2024, Kamala Harris is quite likely to hit a 30-point margin in Wake county over Donald Trump. It's entirely conceivable that she could hit an eye-watering 40-point margin in Mecklenburg county. Even in growing counties that are safely Republican overall, like Johnston, Iredell or Brunswick, the GOP is banking fewer marginal votes there from one cycle to the next.
Republican surrender
The problem for Republicans is actually worse than it seems. In the fastest-growing counties in the state, the GOP has effectively surrendered the field downballot.
In 2024, North Carolina Republicans failed to field a candidate in a whopping 35 out of 170 state legislative districts: 27 House districts and 8 in the Senate. Democrats, by contrast, are fielding a candidate in 167 out of those 170, failing to field candidates in only 3 House seats:
What keen observers may note here is that Republicans have almost completely surrendered Wake and Mecklenburg counties, and much of Durham as well, by failing to recruit or field candidates for election at all:
- Republicans surrendered 9 of 13 House seats in Mecklenburg county, and 4 of its 5 Senate seats (a 6th district, covering some of northern Mecklenburg, is mostly Iredell county)
- Republicans surrendered 7 of 13 House seats in Wake county, and 2 of 5 Senate seats (a 6th, too, also includes Granville)
- A similar pattern holds in Durham, where Republicans surrendered 3 of its 4 House districts and 1 of its 2 Senate seats.
None of this is a large surprise. After all, the Republican metro implosion has been one of the defining themes of the last decade of North Carolina politics, as the party's brand has sunk to toxic status among suburban voters. But this means that in the fastest-growing counties in the state, Republicans have chosen to simply ignore voters altogether rather than meet them where they are.
Of course, Donald Trump still stands a strong chance of winning North Carolina for a third cycle this November. If he is able to squeeze more votes out of the state's vast, majority-white rural counties and find a way to slow down the suburban realignment, his path to victory could look like 2020. But it is no longer 2020 - and much of North Carolina's electorate may be ready to turn the page.
