Is The Research Triangle The Next Northern Virginia?

1996 was a big Democratic year. Bill Clinton won nationwide by a near-landslide 8.5% margin over Bob Dole. Yet Bob Dole won North Carolina by a comfortable 4.7% margin. Republican strength in North Carolina looks even more impressive when we consider the candidates. The Democratic ticket consisted of two Southern moderates, one from a neighboring state. The Republican ticket featured a septuagenarian Midwesterner and a New Yorker. Yet the difference between the national margin and NC margin spread to a remarkable 13.2%. North Carolina remained reliably Republican over the next two cycles. Bush carried the state by 13% in the squeaker year, 2000. In 2004, the Democrats nominated the senior senator from North Carolina as their vice presidential candidate – and Bush still won by 12.5. That’s a reliably Republican state! But no more. John McCain was a much better candidate than Bob Dole: feistier, and more appealing to independents. He lost to Barack Obama by a margin slightly smaller than Dole’s in 1996, 7.3%. This time, however, the GOP lost North Carolina by 0.3%. It’s generally assumed that McCain owed his loss to the black vote. Clearly, Barack Obama energized African American North Carolinians. Yet that fact alone cannot account for McCain’s defeat in the state. The proportion of blacks in the North Carolina population is about double the national average – but even so, the black vote in the state is still not big enough to account for all or even most of the 6 point shrinkage in the differential between the GOP’s national and North Carolina margin over the past 12 years. The demographic facts that matter to North Carolina politics are not black and white. They are brown and green. Over the past decade or so North Carolina has experienced a huge growth in Hispanic population and is now home to one of the largest illegal immigrant populations outside the border states. The Hispanic vote in North Carolina has grown from virtually nothing to 3% - and will continue to rise. More important than Latino immigration, however, has been the change in the white vote. Over the past two decades, many whites from other states (especially the North) have moved to North Carolina, particularly to places like the Research Triangle. They tend to be more affluent, more educated and more liberal than the native North Carolinians. The GOP has not done a very good job of appealing to both the natives and the newcomers. Moreover, it is objectively a very difficult job. The tired cliché “The New South meets the Old South” has a lot of truth to it. North Carolina now has a mix of the “traditional” economy and the “new” economy. Not only there are obvious differences in voter interests and attitudes based on different income levels (e.g. lower middle class voters usually don’t get very excited over capital gains and dividends tax cuts), but trade is also a very divisive issue in North Carolina. Local politicians have always had a strong protectionist streak (exhibit A: the late Jesse Helms). But now there also a lot of residents employed by companies that compete in the global market quite successfully. This dilemma was well personified in Republican Robin Hayes who until a few weeks ago represented the Eighth Congressional District (stretching from Charlotte to Fayetteville) in the House and had one of the toughest jobs in federal government. On the one hand a lot of his constituents work at textile mills (or at least they did before the industry got devastated by cheap imports), on the other hand a lot of them work for IBM, giant banks, etc. (and IBM employees rarely wake up in the middle of the night worrying that competition from Honduras might destroy their jobs). Hayes originally voted against CAFTA, but then was persuaded by the GOP House leadership to change his vote. CAFTA passed with not a single vote to spare. Hayes still won the following election (in 2006) by 329 votes (that was even closer percentage wise than the CAFTA vote!), but eventually succumbed in 2008. Of course, the Democrats face the same trade dilemma, but they have a lot more room for maneuver, since they have the minority vote locked up regardless of their position on trade. So as a lot of NC voters feel that the GOP does not represent their economic interests, the party still tries to attract them (relatively successfully!) on social and cultural issues. But the problem is that some of those issues turn off a lot of Yankee newcomers. And some of those issues have economic repercussions. E.g. many newcomers not only value education, but their relocation to NC was in part motivated by educational opportunities for their children, so they get really scared by the GOP pandering to those who want to teach creationism in schools (if they ever had to send their children to private schools instead, that would effectively be a huge tax increase for them). We need to realize that no matter how exactly the GOP overhauls its message, a lot of North Carolina voters will feel alienated on either economic or social issues (or both!). So getting enough white votes to compensate for lopsided Democratic majorities among the minorities will be more and more difficult. It is too early to predict whether North Carolina will eventually go all the way to being a reliably Democratic state or will merely become a swing state, perhaps even a Republican leaning swing state (sort of a cross between Arizona and Ohio). But chances are we will never again be able to count on NC as a reliable Republican state. Andrew Pavelyev is a scientist specializing in mathematical modeling in medicine. He immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1992 and now resides in Charlotte, NC.