On Wednesday, Mac McCorkle and Rachel Salzberg released a study that show North Carolina’s “countrypolitan” counties hold the key to victory for Republicans in North Carolina. According the authors, Democrats need to cut into the GOP margin in these counties if they hope to win in the future. That translates into a strategy that focuses more on persuasion than turnout, since the countrypolitan counties are among the Whitest in the state and the Democratic base in North Carolina is predominantly African American. 

McCorkle and Salzberg compare North Carolina to our neighbors, noting that Virginia has been trending blue for more than decade and Georgia has surpassed North Carolina as the state in the South that Democrats hope to turn a bluer shape of purple. North Carolina has a smaller African American population than Georgia and a less educated one than Virginia. Here, Democrats will need to secure support of White voters who are more blue collar than white collar. That argues for a message and platform that focuses more on kitchen table issues than social ones. 

The authors define the countrypolitan counties as ones adjacent to urban centers. They “qualify as metropolitan according to the federal Office of Management and Budget due to significant job-commuting ties with big-city counties” even though they have some characteristics of rural counties. They are counties like Cabarrus, Union, Johnston, Henderson, and Rockingham. 

I would argue that a lot of the counties also still have a significant amount of the population was born and raised in North Carolina. They are cultural Southerners. In the faster growing counties like Johnston, many moved from more rural areas to be closer to jobs in urban centers. They joined other people who grew up in those counties before they became bedroom communities. In the slower growing counties like Rockingham, most of those people have been there generations. All retained their more traditional values and perspectives. 

For Democrats to win these cultural Southerners, they need to find points of agreement, not points of outrage. They have values in common. Many of those North Carolina natives still support public education and see it as a vehicle for economic advancement. A significant proportion probably supports raising the minimum wage. They want to contain medical costs and they want easier commutes with better roads and bridges. And they support small businesses more than big corporations. 

To win these voters, Democrats need a more populist message than progressive one. For decades, North Carolina Democrats separated themselves from the national party by keeping a narrow focus on pro-education and pro-business policies. While other Southern states shifted to Republicans in the latter 20^th century, North Carolina Democrats kept winning at the state level until 2010.  Since then, they’ve managed to keep the state relatively even, winning large majorities of newcomers, even as they lost the native White population. Only gerrymandering has kept Republicans with such strong majorities in the legislature.

As the Countrypolitan study says, Democrats need to lose those voters by a smaller margin. They need an outreach program to convince them that Democrats are focused more on economic and education issues than cultural ones. Turnout alone won’t solve Democrats’ problems here. They need to win over some hearts and minds.