Is NC still a battleground state after Trump won for a third time?

North Carolina was one of seven battleground states that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had their eyes set on for a path to the White House. And, like all the others, the Tar Heel State went for Trump, ultimately sending him back to Washington, D.C. 
While the MAGA Republican clinched the state, by a larger margin than in 2020, Democrats swept several state races. Democrat Josh Stein won the governorship by almost 15 percentage points and the party also broke the Republican supermajority in the state House and flipped the partisan affiliation of two council of state races. 
It’s a confusing predicament – How could a state that consistently elects Republicans at the top of the ticket still be considered a battleground, said Christopher Cooper, author of the “Anatomy of a Purple State: A North Carolina Politics Primer.” 
The answer is in the mess, Cooper said.  
“It’s a confusing state to look at politically, and I think that’s exactly what reinforces it’s purple, messy, confusing status,” said Cooper, who also teaches political science at Western Carolina University. 
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The state’s track record of electing Democratic governors sparks intrigue for Democratic presidential campaigns, said Mac McCorkle, former Democratic political consultant for Mike Easley, the 72nd governor, and others.
“As a former consultant, you cannot look past a state where Democrats have won the governorship that many times in a row,” McCorkle said. 
It may be a place that breaks “national Democrats’ hearts all the way back to the Clintons,” McCorkle said, but it’s still undeniably one to keep fighting for. 
Despite this, it’s unlikely to flip blue anytime soon. 
McCorkle, who now teaches at Duke University, has been anticipating that flip for years.  
In the ‘90s, he predicted that “North Carolina’s just on the cusp of becoming a progressive state,” and yet, 30-plus years later, “we’re right on the cusp still,” McCorkle said as he chuckled. 
Looking at demographic trends, which show the state gaining tons of new residents, it still looks like 2028 will bear similar results. 
“The demographic trends suggest that we’re still going to be kind of a stuck purple state,” Cooper said. “A state that exists in this space between red and blue, never quite tilting completely to one direction or the other.” 
North Carolina cannot be won by the same strategy as other battleground states because “the rural vote still matters, and that makes it very unique,” Cooper said. 
McCorkle argues there’s an even more specific group that should matter to Democrats in the Tar Heel State: ‘Country-politan’ voters. 
They’re the voters who live in counties that sit outside of urban strongholds like Mecklenburg, Wake and Guilford. 
Democrats are bound to win in urban counties, McCorkle said, but country-politan counties, or exurbs, are where Democrats are losing, and bad. 
These are often people who may commute into a bigger city like Charlotte or Greensboro but live outside and are still “rural in mentality,” McCorkle believes. 
In the seven counties surrounding Mecklenburg County, the total votes cast for Trump almost erased Harris’ lead in Mecklenburg, McCorkle said. 
These counties, which McCorkle said there are over 25 of, were the winning areas for Trump in 2020, he wrote in an op-ed in “Politics North Carolina” with co-author Rachel Salzberg. 
“But almost all Countrypolitan counties were heavily red in 2020,” McCorkle and Salzberg wrote in 2022. “Although largely next door to the state’s bigger-city Democratic bastions, Countrypolitan counties constituted a stronger base of Trump support than the state’s 50 counties outside of North Carolina’s metropolitan regions. Biden had more of a Countrypolitan than a rural and small-town problem.” 
One of those country-politan counties McCorkle talks about is Gaston County.  
The county, which sits right outside of Charlotte, has a population of over 200,000 and a voter registration make-up leaning toward Republicans.  
Gaston County voted for Trump and has supported Republican presidents in recent elections too by usually over 20 percentage points.  
Despite this year’s red win there, the margin by which Democrats lost shrunk from 2020 by 2.7 percentage points. 
In large part, David Wilson Brown, the county’s Democratic Party chair, attributed this to support from the coordinated Harris campaign, which planted a physical headquarters in Gaston back in August. 
“The ground game here was sensational compared to how it’s been in the past,” Brown said. It was a big change from 2020 where they “didn’t have a coordinated campaign effort at all in Gaston County.” 
Brown said the concern he hears from parents often centers around opportunity.  
“The biggest complaints I would have from mothers and grandparents is that, you know, for their children to succeed, often they had to leave those rural counties in order to find work and find success,” Brown said.  
He believes GOP economic policy has hurt rural North Carolinians, but Democrats have been unable to successfully communicate that message to this demographic, he said. 
Although Brown felt like the coordinated campaign understood the rural vote and voter needs this year, there’s still lots of work to be done. 
“I wish we could talk to that without, you know, lecturing people that they’re voting against their own interests, when that’s what’s happening,” Brown said about rural voters choosing Republicans. 
McCorkle also thought the Harris campaign had a better grasp on this demographic in 2024, along with the new state Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, who has emphasized the importance of rural voters. 
The problem was Democrats “left those areas defenseless for way too long,” McCorkle said. “There’s been years of neglect” that needs to be addressed, he added.