North Raleigh is conservative politically, right? Well, there's no better way to test commonly held perceptions than elections, so I crunched some numbers.

I looked at the presidential vote for all of Raleigh's precincts in the area bounded by the Beltline on the south, Glenwood Avenue on the west, and Capital Boulevard/ Louisburg Road on the east. Some precinct lines stretch across the city's northern border so the area I examined includes some parts of Wake County outside the city. Also, I didn't count the Libertarian vote because it was so tiny.

So this may not be social science at its purest, but it's possible the results tell us something about ourselves:

NORTH RALEIGH

Bush53%

Kerry47%

NORTH CAROLINA

Bush56%

Kerry43%

UNITED STATES

Bush51%

Kerry48%<

North Raleigh voted more Republican than the nation as a whole. But, though the area is perceived as the city's GOP stronghold, we did not support Bush quite as strongly as the rest of this solidly red state.

Maybe we should color North Raleigh pink.

I asked North Raleigh resident Bill Robinson what he thought of all of this. Robinson, 66, is a member of the state Democratic Party Executive Committee as well as vice chairman of the Wake County Citizens for Effective Government.

To Robinson, the results show that, though the GOP still holds sway in North Raleigh, newcomers are making the area "more liberal, more educated, more high tech" than many realize -- even many state and county Democratic leaders, he said.

Of course, many newcomers are conservative, too, Robinson acknowledged. But this election may show that we are inching closer to the average.