As of 2020, the national Republican Party had only won the popular vote in one of the previous eight presidential elections. The political class believed that this failure represented a serious indictment of the GOP, even though Republican presidents had held the White House for 12 years in this period.
But North Carolina Republicans have suffered a far greater failure. They have only held the state’s top executive office for four years since 1992. They may have built a party that simply cannot win governors’ races.
The main dynamic in the last 50 years of North Carolina politics has been the rise of the Republican Party. Democrats carried the state in every presidential election from 1876 to 1964, with one exception taking place in 1928 when the party nominated a Catholic for president and this Bible Belt state proved too bigoted to vote for “Romanism.”…