RALEIGH – The 2009 election cycle is a prime example of how political trends are sometimes hard to spot when they’re approaching, hard to describe when they arrive, and hard to flag when they’ve run their course.

Around the country, conservatives and Republicans are jubilant about the outcome of two gubernatorial races watched closely this year for signs of a GOP resurgence. Republican Bob McDonnell breezed to a win as the new governor of Virginia. And in New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie defeated incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine is what was the most competitive – and thus the most notable – of the races on the national radar screen.

So 2009 turned out to be a Republican year, huh?

Well, the story is a bit more muddled here in North Carolina. Back in the 1990s, Republican gains in legislative and congressional seats were preceded by Republican or conservative successes in municipal politics. It wasn’t just Tom Fetzer’s win for Raleigh mayor in 1993 that signified the trend. Republicans also did well in other cities. By the late 1990s, there were Republican mayors in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Durham, and Wilmington. Greensboro’s mayor was the only one to remain Democratic throughout the period.

The 2009 balloting yields a strikingly different picture. Democrat Anthony Foxx defeated Republican John Lassiter Tuesday in the race to replace Pat McCrory as mayor of Charlotte. That’s huge. Since McCrory was the only GOP mayor of a large NC city going into Tuesday, you’d think that would complete a Democratic sweep of all the top mayoral posts.

But you – and I in my pre-election column – would be wrong. In Greensboro, of all places, the incumbent Democratic mayor Yvonne Johnson fell to Republican challenger Bill Knight, who ran on a fiscally conservative platform. I didn’t even put the Johnson-Knight race on my watch list. Whoops. Republicans also now have a majority of seats on the Greensboro City Council.

Still, it’s worth remembering that Democrats – the “nonpartisan” fiction notwithstanding – remain firmly in control of urban politics in our state. Greensboro was the outlier.

North Carolinians on the right side of the political spectrum had another significant election victory to celebrate on Tuesday. In Wake County, the voters ratified the conservative takeover of the school board by giving John Tedesco the last of the four seats up for grabs this year. A majority on the board now favors getting ride of the school system’s unpopular and unsuccessful combination of forced busing, mandatory year-round schooling, and bureaucratic arrogance.

Republicans also won a number of contested mayoral and council races in smaller communities across the state. But they don’t typically draw the media attention that the big-city races do.

The only countywide tax referenda I’ve seen so far also produced a mixed picture: a sales-tax hike passed in Lee County by a significant margin but failed in next-door Harnett County by a significant margin.

So what are we to make of all this?

Well, the national story is pretty clear. In most of the key contests around the country (the special election in New York’s House 23 went Democratic, but only after a brusing and confusing split within the local GOP), Republicans were far more motivated to turn out than Democrats, which is to be expected after two cycles of being walloped and nearly a year of watching left-wing government in action in Washington. These things do, indeed, go in cycles. Democrats got riled up after a 2004 presidential election they thought they’d win, and got busy electing Democrats to local, district, and state offices in 2005 and 2006. Now, it’s the Republicans who are staging a comeback.

On the other hand, economic worries and a popular backlash against Obama’s fiscal and health care policies can only put Republican candidates in a position to win close contests, by giving them a tailwind. There are no guarantees. Against that wind, the Democrats took the Charlotte mayor’s race for the first time since Harvey Gantt lost his reelection bid to Sue Myrick in 1989 1987. In the Queen City, which went solidly for blue candidates in the 2008 cycle as well, Democrats are encouraged and excited, not worried. Their candidate ran a better campaign – as did Greensboro’s new mayor, the conservative Knight.

All in all, it was an interesting and often exciting election cycle. Charlotte turned left, Greensboro turned right. But now starts the Big One – the 2010 election cycle for federal and state offices. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with redistricting to follow in 2011 and President Obama’s agenda still largely on the drawing board. Candidate filing here in North Carolina starts in February. Politics takes few vacations.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation