WRAL-TV has a cool feature on its political page that allows you to quickly pull up the county-by-county results for president, governor, and U.S. Senate. In the GOP governor’s race, there is a striking visual pattern: Pat McCrory won a swath of counties in the Piedmont and High Country, with one exception, while Fred Smith won eastern and far-western North Carolina, plus the Triad region’s Virginia border counties, with two exceptions.
The exceptions are interesting. The only McCrory loss in the center of the state was, actually, smack dab in the center of the state: Randolph County. Perhaps that would have been rectified with an extra high-profile visit to the county. For Smith, a solid east was interrupted only by Halifax County, and there by a small margin. Perhaps a few local Smith supporters there heard that their candidate had been traveling with a country-music singer, had Randy Parton flashbacks, and headed home to sleep off their headaches rather than heading to the polls. In the west, Bob Orr won a single county, Yancey, by an earthquake-like 286 votes.
The McCrory pattern looks a bit like a crescent. It starts in the High Country of Ashe and Watauga counties, comes down the mountain through the Catawba Valley to Charlotte and the Triad, and then curves around to the Virginia border through the western portion of the Triangle. He won Durham and Orange but lost Wake. One reason Smith fall short, however, is that he only won Wake by 930 votes.
