RALEIGH, NC – Democrats failed to wrest the swing state prize of North Carolina from Republicans again in the presidential election, but they scored significant down-ballot victories, giving them hope as they look to the future.

Despite Donald Trump’s more than 3 percentage point victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina, Democrats celebrated Election Day victories in the races for governor, attorney general and the legislature in a tightly divided state where conservatives have recently dominated the General Assembly and the courts.

In an election with few positives for Democrats nationally, ticket-splitting trends among Tar Heel State voters provided some of that good news.

“I think we’ve had quality candidates for office against right-wing extremists, and the people of North Carolina have made the right choices,” Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a Harris surrogate who was once considered her potential running mate, said in the vote inverse. races.

Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, easily defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to succeed Cooper, who was ineligible to run again because of term limits. The campaign was dominated by Stein’s fundraising prowess and advertising and social media targeting Robinson. history of inflammatory statements on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

Democrats have now won eight of the last nine gubernatorial elections in North Carolina. Instead, Republicans have won the state in 11 of the past 12 presidential elections, with Barack Obama in 2008 being the only exception.

In the race to succeed Stein as attorney general, US Representative Jeff Jackson extended a streak of Democratic election victories from 1900 by defeating the rep. American Dan Bishop. Democrats flipped both the lieutenant governor and state school superintendent jobs — defeating, in the latter race, a Republican who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington before the attack on the U.S. Capitol and called public schools “liberal indoctrination”. centers.”

State Democratic Party Chairman Anderson Clayton, the nation’s youngest at 26, is learning to embrace the positives as he faces the headwinds Harris faces at the top of the ticket.

“Everyone keeps telling us a bright spot,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘I lost the presidential race.’

State Republicans can hang their hats for success in 2024 on Trump’s third straight election win and three additional congressional seats — the result of the 2023 redistricting that kept incumbent Democrats from seeking re-election. Those flips were key to national Republicans’ efforts to maintain control of the US House.

But in the state’s only first-term congressional race Democratic Rep. Don Davis narrowly won. While the GOP has retained a veto-proof majority in the state Senate, it likely won’t hold one in the House by a single seat, giving Stein a stronger veto stamp to reject Republican legislation.

Ticket splitting in North Carolina has continued for decades. Voters have long been comfortable with Democrats running state agencies, but less comfortable with the liberal wing of the national Democratic Party.

“People are unhappy and want to see change at the federal level. They’re not as comfortable with the idea of ​​change for the sake of change at the state level,” said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh.

State Republican leaders say their party is still doing well. They point to winning five of 10 statewide executive branch positions, retaining control of the General Assembly and continuing recent dominance in statewide appellate court races. Still, an ongoing state Supreme Court race seems likely to be a recount.

“There’s going to be a lot of talk about North Carolina being a purple state. You’ve all heard me say it before: North Carolina is a default Republican state,” state Senate Leader Phil Berger told reporters after the election.

Still, 2024 will be marked by GOP missed opportunities that some critics lay at Robinson’s feet.

What was billed after the March primaries as the nation’s most competitive gubernatorial race never materialized; Stein won by nearly 15 percentage points. Robinson’s bid was trumped by Stein’s 4-to-1 spending advantage by mid-October and a CNN report that said Robinson had posted sexist and racist remarks on a porn site message board in more than a decade ago.

Robinson denied writing the messages and eventually sued CNN. The case is pending. But the Republican Governors Association stopped running ads endorsing him, most of them his campaign staff resigned and the Republicans distanced themselves. That included Trump, who endorsed Robinson before the March primary and called him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” but stopped appearing with him when Trump passed through North Carolina.

Stein’s campaign was comfortable enough to belatedly send $12 million to the state Democratic Party, which helped other candidates, including General Assembly hopefuls who ran ads linking GOP rivals to Robinson.

“It could have been a historic race for the state of North Carolina, but it didn’t happen,” state Majority Leader John Bell said in an interview. While giving credit to Stein for his campaign, Bell added, “our candidate for governor. ran a very bad campaign.”

Larry Shaheen, a longtime political consultant who is now a fundraiser for the state Republican Party, wrote on X that without the work of party leaders “the damage to the candidates because of Robinson would have been enormous.”

Some conservatives stuck with Robinson and blamed Republican officials who ditched him for some poor election results. Robinson himself complained during the campaign about the politicians in his aisle that “when it gets hot in the kitchen and you turn around and look, they’re not there anymore”.

The next major electoral test will come in 2026, when Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis’ seat is up for re-election. Robinson did not rule out a future bid, which could include challenging Tillis in the primary. Among Democrats, Cooper hasn’t publicly ruled out a 2026 Senate run, and U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel, D-D, has said he’s considering one. Democrats have not won a US Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008.

Still, McLennan said, Democrats gave themselves something to build on.

“Democrats must feel pretty good,” he said. “But they still have a lot of work to do for 2026 and 2028.”

Clayton, the Democratic chairman, said the work begins now. That means recruiting candidates, starting with next year’s municipal races, making sure incumbents have the help they need, and consulting with people across the state to lay the groundwork for future elections.

“We have to go back to basics,” she said.