Yesterday, The Fix moved North Carolina from toss-up to lean Romney, echoing a prediction PoliticOlogy made about two months ago: that the Tarheel State would make its 2008 Democratic shift a one-time swing, and revert back to its Republican ways.
Obama was the first Democrat to win North Carolina since History's Greatest Monster. But despite a thirteen-point swing to the Democrats in 2008, North Carolina barely awarded Obama its 15 electoral votes: he grabbed just 14,000 more votes than John McCain. Still, the state had moved enough to the left to get the DNC's attention. The Democratic Convention will be held in Charlotte this year, and the DNC is spending big on ads, possibly enticed by the state's 111% growth in Hispanic population in the past decade.
But for all that, North Carolina has remained stubbornly divided in 2012, and polling gives a slight edge to Romney. North Carolina unemployment rate is a full point above the national average, joining Florida (8.5%) and Nevada (a woeful 11.6%), and contrasting with swing states like Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where the economy is strong enough that Romney's been getting into trouble for bashing Obama over it.
But it's not just the economy, stupid. In 2008, along with Obama, North Carolina elected Democratic Governor Bev Purdue, who has looked upon his state with increasing beffudlement, first when it passed Amendment One, which scratched a prohibition of same-sex marriage into the state constitution, then when the state legislature twice overrode his vetoes of a budget completely defunding Planned Parenthood. This is to say nothing of NC lawmakers' outlawing global warming by prohibiting the measuring of it.
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Which means, for all that the state's demographics are inching toward Democrats, North Carolina remains a default conservative state. Sure enough, North Carolina's 2012 GOP primary turnout was almost double that of 2008's. More votes were cast for Romney in 2012 than for every candidate in the 2008 GOP primary combined. If Romney can combine discontent over the economy, traditional social conservatism, and a boost in turnout, the state is his for the taking.
Still, demographics should not be discounted, nor the unexpected; PoliticOlogy put Florida in the Romney column before Obama whipped out his executive order halting deportations two weeks ago, a move immediately reflected in his sudden bounce in Florida polling; he could similarly energize the growing Latino vote in NC. And North Carolina has a sizeable African American community (which was partially responsible for Amendment One's passage) that will go mostly for Obama.
Then there's the fact that for all the GOP doubled its primary turnout, they still got nowhere near 2008's Democratic primary total of 1.6 million voters. There are a lot of Democrats in North Carolina, or at least there are when someone gives them a reason to go to the polls. The Obama campaign has four months and a convention to do just that.
It's not impossible, but given North Carolina's recent conservative mojo, it's enough that I agree with The Fix that NC should wear a light shade of red on the electoral map.
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