Why North Carolina Stays Stubbornly Red

LEXINGTON, North Carolina — In his office in Lexington City Hall, Mayor Jason Hayes has a framed photograph of his father, standing inside the nearby Burlington House Furniture-Philpot plant, where he worked until it was closed down in 1985.

His father then worked in a second factory, Thomasville Furniture, but it, too, was shuttered in 2006, just five months before he planned to retire.

“NAFTA,” his son explains, “was the real impetus for all of that.”

The collapse of the local textile and furniture industries a quarter-century ago gutted this city of 20,000 and surrounding Davidson County, leaving abandoned factories and a hollowed-out downtown.

But today the area has turned around. An Austrian company built a $700 million particle board factory in 2018. A laminate manufacturer expanded in 2021. And more is coming: Nucor Steel is building a $350 million plant. Siemens is building a factory to make passenger rail cars. In neighboring Randolph County, Toyota is finishing an $8 billion battery plant.

It’s a tale about the rebirth in local manufacturing in this region, but it’s also the story of the Republican Party’s electoral resilience in North Carolina. Rural and exurban places like Davidson County may not be growing as fast as Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County and Raleigh’s Wake County, the two metropolitan engines of the state’s rapid growth, but they’re serving as an important economic and political counterbalance.

In Davidson’s case, the economic revitalization around manufacturing is reinforcing local conservative tendencies, rather than diluting them with an influx of Democratic-leaning newcomers. So as Mecklenburg and Wake continue to bolster the state’s Democratic performance, Davidson and counties like it have combined to offset those gains, forming a Republican bulwark that’s kept the state narrowly in Donald Trump’s camp.

Statewide, Trump won by roughly 20 points in both suburban and rural areas, according to 2020 exit polls, enough to confound expectations that the state’s growth and increasing diversification would break the Republican Party’s hold on North Carolina.

“The people coming here work with their hands,” said Jimmy Daley, a vice president for a propane company who has lived in Davidson County his whole life, except for four years in the military. “It’s not as much the IT stuff that you see coming into the Charlotte area, the Raleigh area. It’s old school Davidson County. It’s still that manufacturing base — just with higher salaries.”

After Barack Obama narrowly won North Carolina in 2008, many assumed the state would move into the Democratic column. Just as college-educated progressives had colonized Northern Virginia, turning that state blue, Democrats believed the same thing would happen here.

But the Obama sequel never arrived. Republicans have won the last three presidential elections, albeit by close margins. They’ve also won the five U.S. Senate races since Obama’s victory.

The GOP’s recipe has been to squeeze more votes from the state’s most rural counties, while also rolling up robust margins in suburban and exurban counties, like Cabarrus and Union counties outside of Charlotte, and Johnston County outside of Raleigh.

What’s also kept the GOP barely ahead is a different bucket of votes: A handful of counties — some fast-growing, others less so — that don’t fit the classic definition of suburban. Some of these are fueled by retirees, like coastal Brunswick County near Wilmington.

But most are what North Carolina politicos call “Countrypolitan” counties — places on the fringe of urban areas, far enough out so that few Democrats are moving there.

Davidson County is the biggest Countrypolitan county — and for Republicans, the most important. No other North Carolina county gave Trump a larger net-margin of raw votes in 2020.

Its growth rate this decade has been roughly the state average. But its voter rolls are growing at a faster clip than North Carolina overall, including most of the large urban blue counties. That may be because Trump has energized white voters and made them want to register. It could also be because many of the new people coming to North Carolina’s cities are foreign-born, and perhaps not registering to vote.

Davidson, which is home to 175,000 people, hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1944. Over the last dozen or so years, it’s become even more conservative, in part because its demographics are in Trump’s sweet spot. Nearly 80 percent of the county is white, non-Hispanic. Only 23 percent have college degrees, compared with the state average of 37 percent.

In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney got just under 70 percent of the county vote, winning Davidson by nearly 29,000 votes. But Trump captured 73 percent of the vote in 2020 and won by 42,000.

Matt Mercer with the North Carolina Republican Party said political prognosticators focusing on the state’s blue cities keep getting the state wrong. “The demography-is-destiny people have been at it for a long time, and it’s proven not to be true.”

Lexington bills itself as the “The Barbecue Capital of the World,” so when the bottom fell out for the local textile and furniture industries, the distressed city embarked on a public art project to celebrate its one remaining tradition, a fall pork BBQ festival. Lexington encouraged placing ceramic decorated pigs across the city — a pig dressed as a ballerina (Swine Lake) or a pig decorated as puzzle pieces (a pig saw) — which still stand today. It was, in a sense, an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

Republicans have more or less run state government in North Carolina since 2011, and they credit their low-tax policies with attracting the companies that have come to Davidson County. But the biggest factors may have had nothing to do with politics: Interstate 85 — an economic lifeline in the southeastern U.S. — bisects the county, there’s plenty of inexpensive land and there was a ready-made workforce primed to make things.

The southern part of Davidson is very rural, with small communities like Churchland just off the Yadkin River. There is a large reservoir — High Rock Lake — that’s home to retirees. These are some of the most conservative parts of North Carolina, with Trump’s vote share nearly reaching 90 percent.

The northern part of the county is where the growth is. It’s near the county’s two cities, Lexington and Thomasville, and also close to the population hubs of Winston-Salem and Greensboro.

Davidson’s new subdivisions aren’t the type you see in places like Union County outside of Charlotte. There are few 4,000 square-foot homes with turrets.

More typical: 2,500 square feet, front-facing garage, some vinyl siding.

“We have a lot of new homes being built,” said Hayes, the Lexington mayor. “But they are in that $300,000 to $400,000 range. Will we ever be home to the manager class who are running these factories? I don’t know.”

By “manager class,” Hayes is making a subtle distinction between the kinds of working class voters who live in Davidson County and the more white collar voters in the Charlotte and Raleigh metro areas.

Over lunch at Lexington Barbecue — naturally, located on Smokehouse Lane — Christopher Jessup, a high school administrator who is the chair of the Davidson County Republican Party, explains the county’s role as almost defensive in nature.

“Any vote here cancels a vote in Mecklenburg, or Wake or [Greensboro’s] Guilford,” said Jessup.

He’s not alone in thinking that way. North Carolina Republicans often talk about the state’s suburban and exurban counties as firewalls against the cities. Mark Harris, a GOP candidate who is heavily favored to win a seat in Congress in November, has referred to Union County, outside of Mecklenburg County, as “the red wall,” suggesting it’s protecting much of the state from Charlotte’s liberalism.

Many voters here see things the same way.

“At the warehouse where I work, everybody is conservative,” said Stephen Newsome, who lives on the outskirts of Lexington, near a winery owned by NASCAR team owner Richard Childress. (Is there anything more North Carolina than a winery owned by a stock car racing magnate?) The soon-to-be 40-year-old says he’s troubled by the Democratic Party’s social liberalism.

“It’s the indoctrination of children,” Newsome said, “If it’s being brought into our school — that’s a problem. That’s my problem. And that’s what any conservative, what anybody with common sense would say: I don’t care what you do with your lifestyle. But let’s don’t talk about homosexuality, let’s don’t talk about heterosexuality. Let’s not talk about sexuality.”

Recognizing the social conservatism of many of these voters, the Trump campaign has bombarded the state during college and NFL games with commercials that highlight Kamala Harris’ position in 2019 of supporting taxpayer-funded surgeries for inmates to transition to a different gender.

Since 2020, Davidson County has added about 8,000 new voters — a 7 percent increase. Republicans have added about 4,000 of them. Unaffiliated voters have grown by 6,000. Democrats, meanwhile, have lost 2,400. In fact, Democratic registration has been in free fall, dropping from 30 percent of the county’s voters in 2012 to just 18 percent this fall.

Jeanne Doom is trying to fix that. A retiree who lives in Thomasville, the county’s largest city, she became chair of the Davidson Democratic Party in 2023.

“I just want people to say, ‘I’m a Democrat. I don’t have horns. It’s OK for me to put my signs up. It’s OK,’” she said.

She’s had a tough time handing out slate cards at the polls.

“I’ve gotten good at not being spit on,” she said casually, making a guttural sound of someone filling their mouth with saliva. “And then you have to go right or left and then move — fast.”

Hayes, Lexington’s mayor, doesn’t see the GOP’s grip on the county slipping anytime soon. He has a unique vantage point — though his office is non-partisan, he is a registered Democrat. He’s able to win elections, in part, because most of the county’s Democrats are packed in his small city.

While he’s thrilled at the local economic progress (there used to be 100 building permits a year, now there are 1,400) he acknowledges the trendlines suggest he has no political future beyond the city limits.

“If we will get more manufacturing opportunities, even if it’s higher tech manufacturing, that doesn’t represent a large Democratic base,” he said. “That’s kind of the dilemma we face from a pure political standpoint.”

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