RALEIGH – I love rural North Carolina. I got my first newspaper job down east, in Nash County, while as a kid I enjoyed visiting my grandparents in the mountains, in Caldwell County. As a 4-Her, speaker, performer, or journalist, I have visited all 100 counties at one time or another.
So it’s not for want of feeling for rural North Carolina that I observe that the future of state politics lies in the suburbs.
The numbers tell the story. If you get in a car in Gastonia and drive I-85 up through Charlotte to Salisbury, Greensboro, Burlington, and Durham, you will pass through 10 Piedmont counties containing nearly 30 percent of the state’s electorate. If you then add side trips on I-40 from Greensboro to Winston-Salem, Statesville, and Hickory, and east from Durham to Raleigh and Smithfield, your vote total rises to more than 40 percent of the electorate (as of the 2004 balloting for president, Senate, and governor). Finally, chip in the Asheville-Hendersonville corridor in the west and the Wilmington-Brunswick County corridor in the east, and you’ll exceed the 50 percent mark.
Of course, statewide politicians welcome votes from anywhere. They run in popular, not electoral-college contests. But in understanding modern campaigns, it’s important to recognize that rapid growth rates in North Carolina’s metro areas have pulled electoral power away from the rural and small-town communities that once predominated. Political power will follow.
The 25 counties casting the most votes for governor in 2004 accounted for just shy of two-thirds of all the votes cast. These 25 counties include the communities I alluded to above, plus Cumberland, Moore, Onslow, Pitt, and Nash. While statewide candidates often make a show of campaigning in dozens of other counties (particularly if it can be done inexpensively, through tours and media interviews from elsewhere), they rationally concentrate on buying broadcast media, networking, building organizations, and holding campaign events in Charlotte, the Triad, the Triangle, and (to a lesser extent) Asheville, Wilmington, Greenville, and Fayetteville. That’s how they get the best bang for the buck – meaning the greatest number of potential voters reached per dollar of campaign funds.
Now, to say that a swath of communities from Hickory to Rocky Mount – plus Asheville, Wilmington, Greenville, and Fayetteville – now dominate North Carolina politics is not necessarily to say that the suburbs predominate. Wake, Mecklenburg, Guilford, and a few other counties contain true urban cores (though they aren’t very big yet, except in hype). And good portions of the top 25 counties still look pretty rural. Still, the vast majority of recent population growth has been through suburbanization, through growing out rather than growing up. These suburbs have become the key political battleground, as campaign professionals of both parties will attest.
One factor explaining the competitive nature of suburban politics is that many of these new North Carolina voters are from the North or Midwest (plus some foreigners and “half-backers” who first retired down to Florida and have now relocated). Not only do references to the 1972 Bowles-Holshouser stunner or 1984 Hunt-Helms slugfest leave them puzzled, but many have never voted for (or against) Hunt or Helms, the two most prominent and successful North Carolina politicians of the past century. These voters just got here. Although their party registration is a bit less Democratic and more Republican than the typical registration pattern among natives, they also tend to be less ideological. Their allegiances are up for grabs, and they have no problem splitting their tickets – up to a quarter of North Carolina voters routinely do so. That’s how both George W. Bush and Mike Easley won 56 percent of the statewide vote in 2004.
The county maps look a little different in primaries, admittedly. For Democrats, mid-size Eastern counties with sizable minority populations get added to the priority list. For Republicans, mid-size Piedmont and Western counties with large GOP majorities get attention. But in general elections, the I-85 and I-40 corridors are where most of the action is, like it or not.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.