5 takeaways from the most detailed data yet on the 2020 election

North Carolina’s presidential election wasn’t all that close.

There was no recount, as there was in several other swing states. Donald Trump won here, easily, and that result told us much about the voters of North Carolina.

But it didn’t tell us everything.

“The election results in this state are remarkably stable, but the underlying voting patterns are not,” Republican strategist Ray Martin said. “Trump got almost exactly the same percentage here in 2016 and 2020, but his path to that number was much different last year than four years prior.”

North Carolina’s state board of elections recently released the most detailed election data available: Results for each of the state’s 2,700 precincts.

That data doesn’t answer all of our questions. But after analyzing it and sharing our findings with a group of political experts, a few patterns emerged that help us better understand the communities, neighborhoods and groups of people who cast their ballots in November.

Here are some of our biggest takeaways.

Historically blue county goes red, again

For only the second time in recent history, the majority of voters in Robeson County, home of the Lumbee Tribe, cast a ballot for a Republican presidential candidate in 2020.

Once a Democratic stronghold, Robeson has grown more conservative in recent years.

“Robeson has sort of been a ghost of a blue county for a while,” said Raleigh-based Democratic consultant Morgan Jackson, who worked on Gov. Roy Cooper’s campaign. “A lot of people forget Robeson County has been telling us this is going to happen for a long time.”

Part of that shift, experts say, is because the county is racially diverse — the population is 40% American Indian and 24% Black — but culturally conservative.

Robeson went for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and Obama actually gained ground the second time around.

In 2016, Robeson flipped. Donald Trump won Robeson by just 4 percentage points, and a lot of that support came from precincts with majority American Indian populations.

Whether Lumbee voters bought into Trump’s divisive rhetoric, says UNC-Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South Director Malinda Maynor Lowery, “may say something important about how Lumbee voters are seeing their futures in relation to very, very large national issues and concerns.”

A member of the Lumbee Tribe who has spent her career studying its history, Lowery said the Trump campaign’s platform — particularly its anti-abortion and pro-gun stances — resonated with the community there.

“He has hit on a shared sort of fear about the direction national government will take local values and what we stand for,” Lowery said.

In 2020, Trump’s victory margin grew in the county by 14 points, in part thanks to the former president’s backing of the Lumbee Tribe’s efforts to receive federal recognition.

Biden voiced that support too, and earlier. But Lowery said Trump’s messaging managed to spread throughout the “information bubbles” inside the Lumbee Tribe, which has come to trust its own community members as sources far more than anything else.

“News of Trump’s support, even though it was late in the game, spread like wildfire,” Lowery said.

And unlike Biden, Trump held a campaign rally in Lumberton.

That lack of ground game and local organization, said Duke political science professor Kerry Haynie, hurt Democrats in Robeson and other rural counties.

“The Democrats have not done the outreach they need to do to pick up those votes on the table,” Haynie said.

All but four precincts in Robeson County moved toward Trump in the last election cycle, despite the fact that more than half of the county’s registered voters are Democrats.

“If there’s one takeaway from this data that folks can meditate on, it’s: Let’s not assume that ‘nonwhite voters’ is an applicable label, or that that’s a label you can marshal to support your platform,” Lowery said. “You can’t take us for granted.”

Split-ticket voting isn’t dead yet

As politics have become more polarized, voters who cast a ballot for candidates of different parties have become increasingly rare.

But some still exist.

In all, majorities in more than 100 precincts voted for both Trump and Cooper in areas spread across the state. And voters selected other down-ballot candidates across party lines.

In Robeson County, Republican state Sen. Danny Britt won more support than Trump. Britt won more than 63% of the vote — 26 points ahead of his opponent. Trump ran nearly 19 points ahead of Biden in the county, and U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis 13 points ahead of his opponent, Democrat Cal Cunningham.

In House District 47, also in Robeson County, Democrat Rep. Charles Graham won by a slimmer margin, beating his Republican opponent Olivia Oxendine by less than 5 points.

Statewide, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won more votes than Biden, signaling the governor may have garnered more bipartisan support than the Democratic presidential candidate.

“It takes candidates to split the ticket,” Jackson said. “Clearly, the governor enjoyed higher Republican support than any other candidate on the ballot.”

Experts credit Cooper’s response to the coronavirus.

“For the 2020 election, it was a referendum on the pandemic, and there were a lot of voters that think Cooper did a decent job,” Whitney Manzo, associate professor of political science at Meredith College, said.

Ultimately, the few split-ticket voters left have major sway over the outcomes of down-ballot races.

Some 2020 legislative races demonstrate how the strength of a candidate sometimes still matters, even if only a little.

In House District 82, Republican Rep. Kristin Baker, a psychologist from Concord, ran 3 points ahead of Trump — Baker won 53% percent of the vote, while Trump won some 51%. In House District 9, Democrat Rep. Brian Farkas, of Greenville, won by around 51% of the vote, while Biden won by 50%.

And in Senate District 9, Republican Sen. Michael Lee, of Wilmington, ran about 3 points ahead of Trump. All three of those candidates narrowly beat their opponents. Both Farkas and Lee won by less than 1,000 votes.

Movement in the suburbs

Much like in 2016, one of the major divides in the 2020 presidential race was between urban and rural voters.

Trump again ran away with the majority of votes in rural and even suburban precincts across the state. But the N&O’s analysis shows the former president won slightly fewer of those suburban neighborhoods in 2020.

Biden, meanwhile, increased his vote share slightly in the state’s major metropolitan areas from Asheville to Wilmington.

That’s not necessarily great news for Democrats.

“The urban areas are growing, but North Carolina is still a decently rural state,” Manzo said.

In terms of raw numbers, big cities account for a lot of votes. And that may work in some cases for Democrats like Cooper running in big statewide races. But further down the ballot, Haynie said, it’s a different story.

“I think there are enough votes to be had in the metro areas to give the Democrats an advantage in the state,” Haynie said. “However, if you want to ensure that you win and you really want to win solidly — and not just presidential races, legislative races — you’re going to have to get outside of those traditional areas of strength and do better there.”

Republicans’ ability to turn out suburban voters may be an effective way to counter the Democrats’ consistent performance in the cities — if the GOP can hold onto those votes in future races.

But for Democrats in 2020, Haynie said, “the growing strength in suburban North Carolina is the big takeaway.”

A racial divide for the GOP, with a few exceptions

Nationally, some exit polling showed Trump increased his support among Black men casting their ballots in 2020.

Precinct-level data isn’t granular enough to draw that conclusion. But it does show one thing pretty clearly: very few majority nonwhite precincts went to Trump in 2020. The former president won about 30 of those neighborhoods out of more than 500 in November — with American Indian precincts in Robeson being notable exceptions.

And overall, the N&O’s analysis found, the smaller the share of white voters in a precinct, the smaller Trump’s margin of victory.

For Republicans, that trend “is just further confirmation that they tap out when they get to 50%,” Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College, said. “Then it’s a lost cause.”

The distinction is even more stark for neighborhoods where Black voters make up more than 50% of registrations. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won only a single majority-Black precinct — a neighborhood on the north side of Bertie County.

But that support, said Haynie, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Trump saw the margin of victory shift in his favor in many precincts like those in northeastern North Carolina, where Democrats could traditionally count on strong support from Black voters.

Haynie said the populations of those areas are likely to get older and smaller as young voters seek opportunity elsewhere.

“There’s the potential for the Democrats to lose the strength of those strongholds if they’re not careful,” Haynie said.

Those shrinking populations may also mean trouble for Republicans, he said, as the demographics of the state continue to change.

He pointed to Georgia, which flipped from red to blue in 2020 in the top statewide races for president and U.S. Senate. He said North Carolina’s Democratic machinery lacks the sort of on-the-ground mobilization led by Georgia organizers like Stacey Abrams – but that may change in the years ahead.

Stability between elections shows polarization

Despite record turnout across the state, just over 100 precincts in North Carolina flipped from red to blue or blue to red.

Most just grew more Republican or more Democratic.

“You see remarkable stability,” Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University, said. “Our blue precincts are getting bluer, our red precincts are getting redder.”

The few that did flip were in largely suburban areas around the state’s most populous cities — and they largely went from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. But Trump did manage to flip a few dozen rural neighborhoods spread across the state.

The number of precincts considered competitive — that is, those with margins from 45% to 55% between Democrats and Republicans — decreased slightly from 2016 to 2020. And they remain a slim minority: data shows only about 14% of precincts were competitive in the 2020 presidential race.

Overall, there was movement in the Democrats’ favor from 2016 to 2020. Biden added nearly 500,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton, compared to Trump’s nearly 400,000 additional votes.

But to Bitzer, the precinct-level data shows many neighborhoods have largely sorted themselves into partisan enclaves — and that the messaging of 2020 was far more about getting those enclaves to the polls.

“That Democratic surge was certainly there. It was just compensated, deflated, washed out by the Republican surge,” Bitzer said. “But they’re both notable in terms of the intensity of 2020 — how both sides were energized, mobilized and got their vote out.”

That momentum, Haynie said, is still working in favor of Republicans, which managed to hold on despite the growth in Democratic votes.

“The Republicans still are a strong party, probably the strongest party in the state when you look at statewide races,” he said.

This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 2:10 PM.

Tyler Dukes

The News & Observer

919-696-1935

Tyler Dukes is the lead editor for AI innovation in journalism at McClatchy Media, where he leads a small team of journalists that helps the company’s 30 local newsrooms responsibly harness data, automation and artificial intelligence to elevate and strengthen their reporting. He was previously an investigative reporter at The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C. In 2017, he completed a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University and grew up in Elizabeth City, N.C.

Lucille Sherman

The News & Observer

Lucille Sherman is a state politics reporter for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun. She previously worked as a national data and investigations reporter for Gannett. Using the secure, encrypted Signal app, you can reach Lucille at 405-471-7979.