Every two years, a red flood seems to engulf rural North Carolina polling places. Republican turnout in rural areas has been staggering since the Obama era, and this consistently super performance has ensured a continuing red lean in statewide elections despite the changing face of the state. Democrats, it seems, cannot match the Republicans’ ardor.

That turnout’s a Republican forte is inarguable. In 2020, the Republican base voted at a rate of 81%, extraordinary even for one of the busiest elections in modern American history. The Republican Party accounts for 33% of registered North Carolina voters but 37% of voter turnout, making the GOP advantage, as party chair Michael Whatley explained, one of the most dramatic in the country. By contrast their Democratic opponents have seen base turnout decline year by year ever since the fabled landslide of 2008.

Republican turnout, then, is principally responsible for this state’s light-red lean. The fundamentals of the state are trending blue. As Carolina Forward (a center-left nonprofit to which I contribute) has explained, North Carolina’s urban cores have become solid Democratic. And each city’s exurban periphery has trended well to the left since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. Among exurban counties, only Iredell (a wealthy enclave on the far outskirts of the Charlotte metro) has not moved significantly to the progressive left. Not coincidentally, Donald Trump owns a golf club there.

Republican turnout has reached such celestial levels because reasons familiar to any observer of national politics. Traditionalist whites are reacting to cultural transformations that alarm them. But the dynamic has been so dramatically observed here, rather in other states, because the gale-force changes in the societal winds have manifested more potently in North Carolina than anywhere else. Americans may picture California as the ultimate cauldron of cultural churn, but it’s in North Carolina that these trends have had the most noticeable effect.

The mechanism is migration. Between the end of white settlement around 1800 and the beginning of the 1990s, North Carolina received essentially zero global immigration. In 1930, only 0.3% of North Carolinians were foreign-born. But, to take the example of one immigrant group, the Latino population of the state soared from 77,000 in 1990 to 600,000 in 2006. This massive upending of a biracial status quo ante stunned culturally Southern whites–and led to a determination to reassert their lost hegemony.

As tobacco fields were plowed over for subdivisions built by immigrants, the resentments of xenophobes festered powerfully. Carolina Forward observed an extreme hostility to undocumented immigrations among Republican poll respondents. It stands to reason that their ardor to restore the cultural settlement has led many dormant conservative voters to race to the polls. Driven further by Donald Trump: Republican turnout reached frothy rates sine the Defendant from Mar-a-Lago first sought the White House. As culturally conservative whites have grown more and more belligerent, the Republican Party has reaped victories again and again.

None of this sordidness, however, should give us pause about cultural change in North Carolina. The growing diversity of the Tar Heel State has brought a Southern province into the national mainstream. And Republicans have dived too deeply into the netherworld of anti-elitist resentment. At some point there will be no blood left in the grievance-vote turnip. There’s no such thing as destiny, but demographics will someday become an overwhelming force.