In North Carolina, a hard-right shift hits a roadblock

[Alcibiades]

10. Not really, no

We're nothing like San Jose, never have been. But North Carolinians did have a Democratic Party that kept power for 100 years. Younger North Carolinians are nothing like the folks who elected Jesse Helms over and over again. It's a long complicated history--on the eve of the civil war, iut was folks in the western part of the state who were more progressive on race, or who at least saw little sense in a war much more avidly supported in Virginia and South Carolina--at least half a dozen secession votes failed, as I recall, before NC finally did it, becoming the tenth state to do so.

Today, the state is much like other states, except we do have more folks from out of state than many places, so we are a little like Cali in that regard (I did my doctorate at Davis, BTW). The big urban centers are overwhelmingly Democratic, the rural areas, most of which had been Democratic for 100 years, have become Republican.

There are a lot of white, rural, Protestant men in the state who vote the way you think they would vote--I call them the Jesse Helms people. But our number one source of migration has been New York state, and many of those folks are Democrats. The children of Spanish-speaking foreign nationals are also aging into the voting-age population, and they tend Democratic, too. When you add these folks to the existing tradition of North Carolina Democrats, what you might call the Jim Hunt people, you have a majority, at least in presidential years, and pretty soon in the off-year races, too. The clock is ticking on the GOP majority in the General Assembly. Yes, they have gerrymandered the hell out of my state, but the proof is in the pudding, and plenty of folks are discovering it is a foul-tasting pudding indeed.