Urban counties' voters turn North Carolina blue

By: Wesley Young | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: January 22, 2009

(This article is part of President Obama: A Commemorative Section of the Winston-Salem Journal)

Voters in North Carolina's more urban counties led the way in November toward switching North Carolina from a red state to a blue in presidential elections.

The election was about as close as they come in North Carolina, with Democrat Barack Obama edging out Republican John McCain by fewer than 15,000 votes among the nearly 4.3 million votes cast.

Mapping the results at the county level, the state still looks a lot more red than blue: Obama carried only 33 of the state's 100 counties.

McCain won 67 counties.

The eight counties where more than 100,000 people voted gave Obama his biggest push toward victory in North Carolina. Those eight counties -- Wake, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Forsyth, Durham, Cumberland, Buncombe and New Hanover -- together cast 1.7 million votes, about 40 percent of the total number of votes cast in the election.

In 2004, voters in those counties almost equally split their votes between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in 2004. In 2008, they made a decisive swing to the Democrats, voting for Obama over McCain 59 percent to 40 percent.

For instance, Forsyth County Democrats turned a 12,000-vote loss in 2004 into a 17,500-vote victory in 2008.

Wake County tilted to President George Bush by a margin of fewer than 7,500 votes among some 350,000 votes cast in 2004. A mere four years later and Obama trampled McCain by 64,000 votes in Wake, in a year when almost 440,000 people cast ballots there.

Among the eight counties where more than 100,000 people voted, only New Hanover (home of Wilmington) went Republican by fewer than 1,500 votes.

Outside of the large urban areas, Obama had strength in rural counties with high minority populations.

But in most of the mid-size counties of the state, places like Davidson, Randolph and Iredell counties in the Piedmont, Republican red reigned supreme. It was not uncommon for McCain to take two-thirds or more of the vote in those counties. But even so, Obama did better in those counties than Kerry did in 2004.

As a group, the counties where fewer than 100,000 people voted backed McCain with 56 percent of the vote, a margin of over 12 points over Obama.

"Obama ran particularly strong in the cities, and he cut Democratic losses in some of the outlying counties," said Ferrel Guillory, the director of the Program on Public Life at the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.

"He didn't win them but he did somewhat better than Kerry."

For example, while Obama captured only 33 percent of the vote in Davidson County, that was a 5,200-vote improvement there over Kerry's showing, and a four-point improvement in the Democratic percentage.

Thad Beyle, a professor emeritus of political science at UNC, said that Obama was especially successful in registering voters in urban areas and getting them the polls.

There was a high registration and turnout of black voters enthusiastic about Obama, he said, and more support for the Democrat from moderate whites. Also, North Carolina is becoming a more urban state all the time, he said.

"The urban votes are in areas where there is a lot of action and where things are going on," Beyle said, adding that time will tell if North Carolina keeps its new role as a swing state.

"It is too soon to say but it is interesting," Beyle said.

■ Wesley Young can be reached at 727-7369 or at wyoung@wsjournal.com.