Booming Suburbs of North Carolina Are Changing the Election Map

(Bloomberg) -- For Kristina Jeffreys, leaving Rhode Island for North Carolina was about being her own boss. To Shannon Halbur, heading east from Wichita to the suburbs of Raleigh in 2020 meant a chance to settle down into retirement after years of moving for her husband’s auditing job.

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Jeffreys, 36, and Halbur, 70, landed a few miles apart in Johnston County, home to an expanding Novo Nordisk operation that churns out weight loss drug Ozempic — and has helped make this one of the fastest growing counties in one of the fastest growing US states.

Both women are part of a shift that could shape November’s presidential election, as well as the future politics of North Carolina. As its population expands and changes, a state that has only backed one Democratic presidential candidate since 1976 now looks increasingly purple. It’s a story replicated in other 2024 battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia.

But North Carolina this election year also offers a cautionary note to the idea that demographic destiny is on the Democrats’ side. The reality on the ground is more complicated, as illustrated by new arrivals Jeffreys and Halbur, who sit on opposite sides of the swing state’s political divide.

A native of Boston, Jeffreys now runs the Southern Bostonian vintage emporium in Selma, North Carolina. It houses the Hahvahd Yahd Café, whose name celebrates her own stretched-vowel Boston accent. She’s also an unapologetic fan of Donald Trump.

“All five of my dogs have been named after the president,” Jeffreys says. “After I got Trump there was Pencey for [Vice President Mike] Pence. And I’ve got MAGA, KAG [Keep America Great], and Freedom.” Though Pencey, like Trump’s former running mate, is no longer part of the family. She’s been adopted by a friend, Jeffreys says. “I don't have her anymore.”

Halbur, on the other hand, is a dedicated Democratic volunteer who spends up to three days a week canvassing for Kamala Harris and local candidates and established the local chapter of gun-control group Moms Demand Action. “I would love to see North Carolina be THE swing state,” she says. “I just can’t see how she could lose. I just don’t believe there are that many people that will still vote for Donald Trump.”

Trump won the state by just 74,000 votes in 2020, and this year’s race looks close too. The latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing states, published last week, shows the GOP candidate ahead in North Carolina by just over a percentage point — well within the margin of error.

In a contest that tight, how the new arrivals vote can make all the difference. Population shifts have wider effects too. They encourage the parties to put campaign resources into regions they might once have ceded without much of a fight — opening up new potential for get-the-vote-out efforts to boost turnout.

Democrats aren’t taking the newcomers for granted. They are also focused on Black voters in both urban and rural areas, and even rural Republicans who have grown disenchanted with Trump.

Similar calculations are under way across North Carolina’s 100 counties, in both red and blue strongholds. Even in the state’s mountainous west, where communities were devastated by Hurricane Helene, the damage was spread across Democrat-leaning Asheville and the surrounding red counties, and party strategists say it’s hard to predict the net election impact of a trauma that’s still so fresh.

There are more than 400,000 additional voters registered in North Carolina compared with 2020, according to a Bloomberg analysis. At first glance, the numbers don’t point to an obvious Democratic gain from the wave of in-migration triggered by Covid. The number of registered Democrats is down by nearly 200,000, according to the Bloomberg analysis.

It’s a pattern repeated in fast-growing Johnston County. More than 6,500 voters who cast ballots in a different state in 2020 have moved into the county since that election, settling disproportionately in its suburban northwest, according to data from L2, a nonpartisan provider of voter records. A quarter of those voters identified as Democrats and a third were Republicans. The biggest share – 36% -- were unaffiliated.

Anderson Clayton, the 26-year-old chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, cautions against expectations of a demographic windfall and argues such predictions have hurt Democrats in the past. She also says that party affiliations don’t always tell the whole story, and that many incoming Republicans are winnable for Democrats.

“They’re New York Republicans who are used to having abortion rights in their state,” she says. “It’s a different type of Republican party down here in the South.”

Jason Simmons, who chairs the state Republican party, counters that many newcomers are fleeing Democratic-controlled states with stagnant economies, in search of the low-tax and business-friendly environment that’s fueling North Carolina’s growth. “They’re coming here for that quality of life that Republican policies have put into place,” he says.

In any case, the biggest post-pandemic shift in North Carolina is the more than 450,000 increase in unaffiliated voters since 2020.

What’s more, there’s been a flow of independent voters into places like Johnston County that used to be reliably Republican but are quickly being absorbed into the fast-growing — and Democrat-voting — metro areas nearby.

Raleigh, where Harris will hold a campaign event Wednesday, has become one of the south’s most attractive cities for companies and for the arts. Pitchbook, a data company, rates it as one of the top 50 metros in the world for tech startups. It’s a North Carolina boomtown — and its success is spilling over into Johnston County, which lies to the city’s southeast, according to Michael Walden, an emeritus economics professor at North Carolina State University.

“What we’re seeing is hopefully the beginning of a distribution of the wealth in North Carolina, out of the metros, the big metros, to some of the smaller metros and some of the rural counties,” says Walden, who’s spent decades tracking the state’s transformation from an economy driven by tobacco and furniture manufacturing to one drawing tech and biotech companies.

He points to the growth of businesses like Novo Nordisk — which this year announced a $4.1 billion expansion of its plant in Clayton, a fast-growing town in Johnston County — and the arrival of young families and retirees into the area.

A key question for both parties in 2024 is: will such counties continue voting like the rural communities they mostly were — or the big-city-suburbs they increasingly resemble.

Trump carried 61% of Johnston County ballots in 2020, winning by 27,000 votes. Since then, the county has added more than 31,000 people and about 20,000 registered voters.

Democrats hope the influx will at least narrow the gap, and that’s driving a rethink of campaign strategy. The party has invested more in North Carolina’s rural counties than in 2020 or 2016, deploying more than 340 staff in places where Democrats haven’t actively competed since Barack Obama’s 2008 win.

Clayton had 3,500 people when Mayor Jody McLeod, a native of the town and a florist by trade, first won office in 2003. McLeod made an unsuccessful run for the state senate as a Democrat in 2010 and is now a registered independent. He still uses small-town charm to navigate the changing politics. “I've only had one person run against me in my career,” he says. “He was a political science major from NC State. The more he spoke, the better I looked. All I had to do was say, ‘Oh my God! Stacey is getting so big! How’s your mom doing?’”

But it’s not such a small town anymore. Clayton has grown tenfold in two decades, and McLeod says it’s far from done. “In 10 years we will easily be at 75,000 or 80,000.”

Much of the numbers game in Johnston County this year hinges on the rapidly growing development of Flowers Plantation near Clayton, which has been attracting newcomers from Raleigh and neighboring Wake County, as well as out-of-staters like Halbur and Jeffreys.

For Sharon Castleberry, the local Democratic party chair whose family has called Johnston County home for five generations, the mission is twofold: to run up the numbers in precincts like Flowers Plantation — which this year is home to 3,200 more registered voters, and 800 more registered Democrats, than in 2020 — while also turning out the vote in older parts of the county.

Such efforts matter not just for the presidential race, but also for state judicial and legislative contests. Even reducing Trump’s share in Johnston County from 61% to 55% would be a “big deal”, says Castleberry. “That will scare the whatever out of the other side.”

Castleberry knows how much turnout matters, especially in local and statewide contests. In 2020, by her calculations, a 1% increase in Democratic turnout in Johnston County would have netted the party another 402 votes. That year, Cheri Beasley — running as the incumbent Democratic chief justice of the state supreme court — lost by 401 votes, which helped end Democrats’ majority control of the court.

In the presidential race, North Carolina’s 16 electoral college votes will likely hinge on the unaffiliated bloc. Marshall Conrad, the 36-year-old lawyer who chairs the county’s Republican Party, is focused on 50,000 such voters, many of whom live in the area around Clayton.

“There was originally a thought that those folks that were moving into that area were going to make our county more blue. And I think they’re definitely pulling us more towards the middle,” Conrad says. “But we just have not seen what folks thought, say four, five years ago, would happen. Those folks that are moving up there, they might be registered unaffiliated, but they’re voting Republican.”

Of course, the battle for votes in Johnston County isn’t all about the newcomers. Democrats are hoping a chance to put the first Black woman in the White House will mobilize more rural Black voters, too.

The strategy is exemplified by candidates like Felicia Baxter, an HR consultant and fitness instructor who moved to Johnston County from her native Raleigh last year and is running for state Senate against an incumbent Republican.

Baxter’s efforts have focused on getting out Black Democrats like her who are frustrated by years of Republican rule in the county. It’s an uphill climb. On a recent Saturday , her focus was on a get-out-the-vote rally in the county seat of Smithfield. Attending were more than a dozen local and statewide Democratic activists and candidates. Conspicuously missing were the Black voters Baxter was hoping to draw out of the surrounding neighborhood.

Baxter conceded that it was a dispiriting reminder of the long road ahead for Democrats in Johnston County. Still, she said, she was reinvigorated the next day by traveling to Greenville where she attended a raucous Harris rally. “We’re going to keep making strides,” she said.

It highlights a longstanding issue for the local party, according to Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. Democrats have been hoping for years that demographics will shift North Carolina in their favor, he says, yet have regularly fallen short by failing to mobilize voters.

“Democrats have the numbers, if they can get their people to turn out,” Cooper said. “That’s a big if.”

--With assistance from Gregory Korte and Alexandre Tanzi.

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