The Blue Wave that Democrats were hoping for certainly did not happen in our area or in North Carolina as a whole, but there are still things for local Democrats to celebrate from Tuesday’s elections.
The biggest win was in the congressional House of Representatives, where Democrats retook the majority with a gain of 27 seats so far and some races still undetermined at the time of this writing. With Republicans still firmly in control of the Senate, this normally means two years of relative stalemate in Washington, but that usually also means good things for financial markets.
Despite those congressional wins, in North Carolina there was no change in our 13 congressional spots as far as party goes. Even though all 10 Republican and three Democratic held seats were up for re-election, 10 Republicans and three Democrats won. Our only new congressman will be Republican Mark Harris for the 9th District,which includes all of Robeson County. He replaces Republican Robert Pittenger.
What stands out about that is that Republicans won only 50.3 percent of congressional votes statewide to Democrats 49.6 percent Yet Republicans won 77 percent of the seats with that small margin of votes. That is due to the $10 million of state funds Republicans spent to draw those carefully gerrymandered congressional districts. After six years of legal battles these districts have been declared unconstitutional all the way through the U.S. Supreme Court, so those districts will change substantially for the election in 2020. That should mean an increased number of Democratic congressional representatives for North Carolina to more accurately reflect the voting population of our state.
The second piece of good news for local Democrats is that the super majority Republicans held in the North Carolina General Assembly has been broken and Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes will now be able to stand. This will also give Democrats more power to negotiate during important issues like proposed budgets.
The two constitutional amendments designed to give the Republican legislature power over judicial appointments and the state Board of Elections were soundly defeated. Democratic judicial candidates also did very well statewide, most notably on the state Supreme Court with the election of Anita Earls.
In more urban areas of North Carolina Democrats won major races, most notably in Wake County and Mecklenburg County where only one Republican held his legislative seat and seven others were defeated by Democrats. Democrats were also very successful in Cumberland County, most notably in the races for sheriff, clerk of Superior Court, and state Senate.
These results mirror those nationwide and highlight the continuing urban-rural divide that evidenced itself so strongly in the 2016 elections. Simply put, urban areas of our country are getting more Democratically blue and rural areas are getting more Republicanly red, and the same is true for North Carolina.
That trend often does not hold true in local county elections, where the results are more mixed. I suspect that is because we tend to personally know our local candidates better and vote more for the person than the party. I certainly saw many yards in my area that had campaign signs for candidates of both parties in local elections, and in Bladen County where I live there were no local offices flipped from one party to the other. In fact the only change was that one Democratic Board of Education member lost his seat to another Democrat.
Just like every other election, there are some results that I celebrate and some that I want to curse about (but I don’t). I think that is probably true for nearly every other political observer as well.
And so we pick ourselves up, get back to our party meetings, and hope to be more successful in the next election. Our country has changed more in the last two years than I could have imagined, but hopefully the victories we achieved in last Tuesday’s elections will lead to better things for our counties, state, and nation.
