By Alexander H. Jones

In North Carolina political geography, “the suburbs” is a term that sits somewhere between the realms of holy grail and hoary cliché. Republicans and Democrats have sought to gain an advantage in the rolling and rollicking centers of urban sprawl as suburban voters came to dominate the state’s electorate. The evolution of these communities, accordingly, has been considered essential to understanding the overall political dynamics of the state.

The development of partisan politics in modern North Carolina is in large part a story of Republican growth in the suburbs. North Carolina had an unusually strong state Republican Party during the era of the Democratic Solid South, but the GOP was primarily a regional, mountain-based party that did not have the reach to compete seriously in statewide elections. Republicans became viable when air conditioning and federal highway programs began to seed the growth of a suburban civilization in the humid forests of the North Carolina Piedmont.

The first eruption of conservative growth actually took place before Republican candidates had gained a foothold in the state. In 1950, some of the conservative Democrat Willis Smith’s strongest precincts were suburban areas with high incomes and growing populations of educated people. Suburban conservatism grew further when Republicans Jim Broyhill and Jim Martin were elected to Congress in the suburbanizing west-Piedmont region. By 1960, Republicans had become strong enough that GOP gubernatorial nominee Robert Gavin ran the most competitive race for governor of any Southern Republican in decades. The main reason for his viability was that many white voters were angry at Democrat Terry Sanford for taking a moderate stance on civil rights. But in fact, Gavin was a racial moderate — to the chagrin of TV commentator Jesse Helms, who told him that Black people would never vote for a Republican. The 1960 race represented suburban change as well as racial turbulence.

GOP candidates continued to accrue support in suburban North Carolina over the coming decades. By 2002, Elizabeth Dole’s dominant victory over Democrat Erskine Bowles in that year’s Senate race had Democrats in despair about their weakness in suburban areas. And upscale suburbanites would remain Republican voters for the next 12 years, even as the GOP turned increasingly toward a fiery, abrasive populism geared toward rural whites. John McCain won handily in North Raleigh despite the ignorance of his running mate Sarah Palin, and the Romney-Ryan ticket’s severe fiscal austerity did not deter voters in suburban Charlotte and Raleigh from continuing to pull the Republican lever. Many suburban Republicans seemed not to understand how extreme their party had become.

The first tremors of the political earthquake broke in 2013. Jubilant after winning complete control of government, North Carolina Republicans passed a conservative agenda of breathtaking scope and savagery, particularly targeting public education. This amounted to smashing the hottest hot button in suburban politics. As early as 2004, North Carolina political observers had noted to the magazine National Journal that suburban Republicans became more open to voting Democratic when public education was at stake. In the 2014 midterms, Democrats seemed to reap some of this support in the affluent and highly educated suburbs of Wake County. Democrat Gale Adcock defeated the uncontroversial Republican Tom Murry in Morrisville and Democrats won every seat on the Wake County Board of Commissioners.

What had happened was that suburbanites had experienced an epiphany about the nature of the modern Republican Party. Having defaulted for years to their Reagan-era assumptions about the two parties, educated North Carolina voters began to see that their ancestral party had been fundamentally transformed by the rise of right-wing populism. This trend received an injection of rocket fuel with the rise of Donald J. Trump. Wake and Mecklenburg County now consistently give Democratic candidates over 60% of the vote, and even the most conservative, countryfied parts of these counties are knife’s-edge swing districts. Suburban North Carolina has become to the progressive movement what Eastern North Carolina was to the old Democratic machine: a solid bulwark against the conservative tide.

Alexander H. Jones is a Policy Analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.