Special Contribution from Louis Jacobson:
For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.
Below are excerpts from the new chapters in the 2026 Almanac on the state of North Carolina and Gov. Josh Stein, written by Louis Jacobson. Jacobson — a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, a senior columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and a contributor of political coverage for U.S. News & World Report — has written for eight editions of the Almanac since 2000. For the 2026 edition, he served as chief author.
Readers can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code ONSP2026 at checkout.
NORTH CAROLINA:
Few states have more political polarization between rural and populated areas than North Carolina does—and few states have margins between the two major parties so consistently narrow. But for several election cycles running, Republicans have come out ahead in federal races, although in 2024 Democrats put up stronger performances in downballot races.
In the early republic, when Virginia and South Carolina produced statesmen and had grand plantation cultures, North Carolina was often called a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit; it joined the Confederacy only after those two neighboring states had. After the Civil War, North Carolina developed its tobacco industry and lured textile mills south from New England, and the state’s hardwood forests produced raw material for furniture factories. Textile mills spread in the Piedmont region as mill owners saw an opportunity in the South for inexpensive land, cheap labor and state governments eager to foster pro-business, anti-union climates. In the following decades, the textile industry kept expanding and drastically improving the Southern economy, becoming white Southerners’ main source of industrial paid labor. Although textile work had some of the lowest pay among manufacturing industries, people valued the jobs because employment options were few beyond agricultural or service work.
The tobacco-textile-furniture trio enabled North Carolina to grow faster than the national average in the 1920s and 1930s, but the state began lagging in the 1950s. Then, came two jolting developments. In 1959, Gov. Luther Hodges established Research Triangle Park between Raleigh and Durham. With collaboration from nearby universities—Duke, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and North Carolina State—the region became one of the nation’s leading research centers. Meanwhile, Charlotte emerged as the nation’s No. 2 city for banking and finance, behind New York.
These developments help explain how North Carolina has become one of the fastest-growing and largest states. Its population more than doubled from 5.1 million in 1970 to an estimated 11 million in 2024. Charlotte’s population grew from 241,000 to 911,000 and Raleigh’s increased from 123,000 to 482,000. Since the 2010 census, the state has grown by almost 16 percent, enough to add another seat in Congress.
But several populous counties have expanded even faster than the state: the population in Wake County (Raleigh) grew by 32 percent, Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) by 31 percent, Durham County (Durham) by 28 percent, and Buncombe County (Asheville) by 17 percent. U-Haul and United Van Lines’ calculations put North Carolina third and fifth, respectively, for inbound moves in 2024. Immigrants seeking jobs in construction and in the meat and chicken factories have pushed the state’s Hispanic population to 11.4 percent, more than doubling its share in about two decades—although Hispanics’ political influence lags statewide.
As North Carolina has shifted toward pharmaceuticals and aerospace, so have its exports: civilian aircraft engines and parts—fitting for a state that was home to the first flight at Kitty Hawk—and several categories of medical products. (This type of international trade could be at risk from Donald Trump’s second-term tariff plans.) The Triangle, as the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area is known, has become one of the world’s leading hubs for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, including companies such as Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly; Apple, Meta and Amazon have also expanded locally. Highly skilled people from the Northeast have flocked to the state: The jurisdiction of Cary in the Triangle, jokingly said to be short for “containment area for relocated Yankees,” has grown an estimated 33 percent since 2010.
High-tech companies are also sprouting farther west in the Piedmont Triad, the state’s ancestral furniture hub that includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Following the Triangle model, the 350-acre North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, north of Charlotte, focuses on academic research into agriculture and nutrition. Site Selection and Business Facilities magazines and CNBC have regularly ranked North Carolina at or near the top of business-friendly states. Not coincidentally, North and South Carolina regularly vie for the title of the nation’s least unionized labor force. In 2022, Lowe’s opened a 25-story technology hub in Charlotte’s southern end, and Pratt & Whitney is adding to its expanded production plants in Asheville. Even the furniture industry has rebounded in recent years, driven by demand from such retailers as Crate & Barrel. Upholstered furniture, which requires higher-skilled labor and custom production lines, has had strong sales resulting from a surge in remote workers.
Urban, affluent, high-tech North Carolina is not the only North Carolina: Wages have declined in the state’s predominantly rural counties, and researchers have projected that 21 of the state’s 100 counties will lose population from 2020 to 2038. Agriculture in North Carolina remains significant: The state is the nation’s biggest sweet potato and tobacco producer (although tobacco production has slipped sharply), and it ranks second in broiler chickens. North Carolina is also the nation’s second-biggest Christmas tree producer, through a complicated process in which Fraser firs are continually trimmed over a period of up to 15 years before they are harvested. Notably, North Carolina ranks third in hog production, with big feedlots in the state’s southeast. Hurricane Florence, which dropped a record 30 inches of rain in 2018, spotlighted the problems of hog-waste lagoons, dozens of which overflowed amid the flooding.
Rural North Carolina’s psychological draw runs deep: If Charlotte is proud of its downtown bank towers and modern art museum, it is also proud of its Billy Graham Library and NASCAR Hall of Fame. But the region’s economic draw is weaker—North Carolina’s median income has remained in the bottom third of states.
Big-government liberalism spurred greater spending on education; U.S. News & World Report ranks the state 21st in education nationally, higher than any Southern state save Florida and Virginia. North Carolina has historically spent lavishly on highways and amenities, including the nation’s first state-funded symphony orchestra and state high schools for science, mathematics and the arts. A different philosophical strand, religious conservatism, has spawned a communitarian spirit and charitable impulses, though also a conformity-spurring moral undertone. In 1898, white supremacists overthrew the multiracial local government and precipitated the Wilmington Massacre, a push to uproot Black economic and political power; in the early 20th century, North Carolina had a high concentration of Ku Klux Klan chapters. But with a few notable exceptions, the state’s racial conflicts were less intense than in Alabama or Mississippi; the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960 became a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
Nevertheless, in a state with a Black population of 22 percent—the nation’s eighth-highest share—segregation’s legacy persists, including in the drawing of the state’s congressional and legislative district lines. After protesters toppled the bronze “Silent Sam” Confederate statue on the University of North Carolina campus in 2018, university officials moved it to storage. In 2020, the board of commissioners in Orange County, which includes Chapel Hill, voted to apologize for slavery and discrimination, following similar statements by local governments in Asheville, Durham, and Carrboro. These moves triggered backlash in some corners: The University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions policies were challenged legally and then overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a watershed 2023 case.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene hammered western North Carolina; it was the continental U.S.’ deadliest such storm since Hurricane Katrina 19 years earlier; at least 175 people died during the storm and 71 died afterward. Helene was the seventh most expensive hurricane in history, with an estimated $78.7 billion in damage. Relatively few western North Carolinians had flood insurance, but the region’s steep landscape produced vicious floods and landslides. In some remote areas, storm-related road damage meant mules had to carry in relief supplies; the tourist magnet of Asheville lacked safe drinking water for seven weeks after the storm.
In the new millennium, a polarized, party-line politics has evolved, centered partly on economic issues but even more on cultural attitudes. Barack Obama narrowly won the state in 2008, bolstered by high turnout by minorities, affluent whites and newcomers. But Republicans achieved big legislative majorities two years later—the first GOP control of the North Carolina Legislature since Reconstruction—and in 2012, Republican Pat McCrory won the governorship and Mitt Romney won the state in the presidential race. McCrory ran as a centrist, pro-business mayor of Charlotte, but the Legislature produced a virtual assembly line of conservative legislation and dared McCrory to use his veto. Despite “Moral Mondays” protests led by the Rev. William Barber III of the state NAACP, McCrory mostly fulfilled the Legislature’s wishes.
In 2016, McCrory lost narrowly to longtime Attorney General Roy Cooper. In 2020, North Carolina—which arguably had the nation’s most genuinely bipartisan lineup of statewide elected officials—voted to keep the incumbent party in power in every office. But federal elections have been a continuing problem for North Carolina Democrats. Although the margins have often been close, the last Democrats to win federal statewide races were Obama and Sen. Kay Hagan in 2008.
Trump won North Carolina by 173,000 votes in 2016, by 74,000 votes in 2020 and 183,000 in 2024. Democrats consistently gained in the big urban-suburban counties of Mecklenburg and Wake, but the two regions are not as electorally dominant in North Carolina as metro Atlanta is in Georgia—a state that flipped to Biden in 2020 and that elected Democratic senators in 2020 and 2022.
Trump’s victories were fueled by gains in North Carolina’s less populated areas—including Robeson County, notable for its Lumbee Indian population, which shifted from going 58 percent for Obama in 2012 to 63 percent for Trump in 2024. Trump also gained in places with influxes of retirees, such as Brunswick County, which is on the coast southwest of Wilmington and has had its population grow 56 percent since 2010. Trump won it by 25 points in both 2020 and 2024. The state’s political balance of power belongs to “countrypolitan” counties, a term political analysts Mac McCorkle and Rachel Salzberg coined to describe 28 counties within the economic and commuting orbit of North Carolina’s metro areas, but with less racial diversity and lower incomes and less college attainment. These counties have tended to vote for Trump by roughly 2-to-1 margins.
In nonfederal races, however, North Carolina Democrats have generally performed better—especially so in 2024, when a severely flawed Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, allowed outgoing Attorney General Josh Stein to easily keep the governorship Democratic. It also likely helped Democrats win the open-seat races for lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction and hold the secretary of state’s office. Also, Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the state House and led in a hotly contested Supreme Court contest that the GOP challenged in court (and which was unresolved through spring 2025). However, a Republican redistricting plan before the 2024 election produced a 10-4 GOP edge in the U.S. House delegation. Despite Trump’s third consecutive victory in the state, political forecasters expect North Carolina to remain a fiercely contested battleground for years to come.
NORTH CAROLINA'S 2024 CONTEST FOR GOVERNOR:
Democrat Josh Stein, a two-term state attorney general, won North Carolina’s governorship in 2024. He prevailed in a battleground-state contest that became a rout after a steady stream of controversies overwhelmed his Republican opponent, then-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
Stein was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Chapel Hill and Charlotte. His father, Adam, was a law partner of prominent civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers; they founded the state’s first racially integrated law firm and won a 1970 Supreme Court case that desegregated Charlotte’s schools. His mother, Jane, was a public health researcher and liberal activist. As a high school student, Stein organized a voter registration drive and a county commissioner’s race debate. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and both a law degree and a master’s in public policy from Harvard University; one summer, Stein interned for state Sen. Dan Blue, with whom he would later serve in North Carolina’s Legislature. (Blue had clerked for Adam Stein’s firm as a law student.) Josh Stein also taught English and economics in Zimbabwe for two years and worked on affordable housing for the Self-Help Credit Union, a group based in North Carolina and three other Southeastern states.
From 1997 to 2000, Stein served as Democratic Sen. John Edwards’ campaign manager and deputy chief of staff. Stein left Edwards’ employ to become senior deputy attorney general under then-Attorney General Roy Cooper, the Democrat whom Stein would eventually succeed as governor. Stein left the attorney general’s office to run for the state Senate in 2008; he won and served four terms. In 2016, Stein ran for attorney general to succeed Cooper, who was making his first run for governor; Stein won by about 20,000 votes. He was reelected to a second term in 2020, this time winning by 14,000 votes. As attorney general, Stein settled lawsuits against opioid producers and vape makers, helped reduce a backlog in rape testing kits and negotiated a coal ash cleanup with Duke Energy.
In 2024, Cooper was term-limited as governor, and Stein announced a run to succeed him. Stein’s profile was different from past Democratic North Carolina gubernatorial candidates illustrating a shift in the party’s base of support in the state. Historically, North Carolina Democrats nominated gubernatorial candidates who could win in metro areas but who had down-home credibility in less populated regions; Cooper, for instance, worked on his family farm tobacco while growing up. But the pool of potential Democratic candidates from more rural areas “has dried up,” Rob Schofield, editor of the online publication NC Newsline, told U.S. News & World Report. By contrast, Stein is a highly educated suburbanite, mirroring the demographics of today’s North Carolina Democrats.
In the Democratic primary, Stein won the nomination with 70 percent of the vote. On the Republican side, Robinson took 65 percent while defeating state Treasurer Dale Folwell and attorney Bill Graham. But Robinson’s victory alarmed many in the Republican establishment, who feared that his history of controversial comments would test swing voters’ patience. Robinson, a Black furniture factory worker with no political experience, had burst onto the scene in 2018 with a viral video in which he spoke against a Greensboro city council plan to cancel a gun show after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. In 2020, Robinson won a nine-way primary for lieutenant governor with less than one-third of the vote. But, in time, voters became more familiar with his outlandish remarks. They included conspiracy theories about the moon landing, 9/11 and crisis actors in school shootings; musings that Michelle Obama is a man; and antisemitic tropes about Jewish bankers and Holocaust denial.
Until September 2024, the contest was considered competitive, by virtue of North Carolina being a hotly contested battleground state; Donald Trump endorsed Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” But Robinson lost substantial support after CNN published a series of his comments on the porn site Nude Africa, including “I’m a black NAZI” and “some people need to be slaves,” and his claims to have used transgender pornography. After the CNN report, some Republicans urged Robinson to quit the race, but he refused.
In November, Stein won, 55%-40%, even as Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the state. Compared with Cooper’s 2020 victory, Stein increased the Democratic vote by almost 235,000, while the Republican vote fell by more than 345,000. Stein flipped several counties that Cooper had lost four years earlier, including Alamance (Graham), Henderson (south of Asheville), Cabarrus (a Charlotte suburb) and Brunswick (a Wilmington suburb). He became North Carolina’s first-ever Jewish governor.
After Stein’s victory (and the victory of a Democrat, Rep. Jeff Jackson, to succeed him as attorney general) the Republican-controlled state Legislature passed a law to strip both offices of several powers, including the governor’s right to appoint members of the state elections board. Stein and Cooper sued to block it.
Stein’s top priority entering office was to rebuild after Hurricane Helene, which caused an estimated $53 billion in damage in North Carolina; in his first full day on the job, he traveled to the state’s hard-hit western region and signed five executive orders to ease the recovery. Stein also said he wanted to raise public school teacher pay. While the Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the state House in the 2024 elections, they did so barely, which will require Democratic unity to sustain any Stein vetoes.
