. Carolina North Carolina at a Glance State Profile - Gov. Easley (D) - Sen. Edwards (D) - Sen. Dole (R) Presidential Politics Congressional Districting - 01 - Ballance (D) - 02 - Etheridge (D) - 03 - Jones Jr. (R) - 04 - Price (D) - 05 - Burr (R) - 06 - Coble (R) - 07 - McIntyre (D) - 08 - Hayes (R) - 09 - Myrick (R) - 10 - Ballenger (R) - 11 - Taylor (R) - 12 - Watt (D) - 13 - Miller (D) Almanac 2004 Home - States & Districts - Elected Officials - Committees - Election Cycles - Guide To Usage Almanac 2002 Almanac 2000 Almanac 1998 For district profiles and additional information on the elected officials of North Carolina, please use the pull-down menu above.

North Carolina, in its third century as a state, has become one of the leading-edge parts of the nation, a state whose growing economy, booming demography and vibrant culture are in many ways typical of the way the nation is going--or would like to go. This was mostly unanticipated. Few people 20 years ago picked North Carolina as a state that would chart a path to the future. It had no great central city, no Atlanta primed to become another Chicago or Los Angeles, but rather a series of small metropolitan areas spaced out over thickly settled countryside. It did not have what seemed to be cutting-edge industries: the biggest employer was textiles, typically an underdeveloped nation's first industry, and the other two were stolid furniture and soon-to-be-disfavored tobacco. Geographically, it seemed to be off the nation's main lines of commerce--too steamy to be businesslike in the summer, too cold to be a resort in the winter. It did not seem socially advanced, with a population made up almost entirely of native-born Anglo-Saxons and African-Americans and with an attachment to traditional and sometimes fundamentalist religion.

Yet North Carolina has emerged as one of America's leading growth states. Its population grew by 37% from 1980 to 2000, from 5.9 million to 8 million; it ranks just behind also-fast-growing Georgia as the 11th largest state. Its economy has diversified and grown steadily. The number of textile and tobacco jobs is down, but Research Triangle Park, between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, has become one of the world's leading pharmaceutical and high-tech research centers. Charlotte has become one of the nation's leading banking centers, the headquarters of Bank of America (formerly NationsBank and NCNB) and First Union; when Florida's SunTrust sought to buy Winston-Salem-based Wachovia, the legislature passed a law to shore up the North Carolina management. Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham accounted for half the state's population growth in the 1990s, and they are now not just regional centers but major metro areas, with national sports franchises and huge hub airports. Nearly half the state's population--and more than half its affluent population--are in the Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Greensboro-Winston-Salem metro areas which have spread out into formerly rural counties. North Carolina is not Mayberry any more.

Not all of North Carolina is upscale. The state is the nation's number two hog producer, and the waste from big hog lots has polluted the state's rivers, most spectacularly when Hurricane Floyd drove the rivers upstream in November 1999; big national trial lawyers started targeting the hog industry. Some people are worried about the state's decline in manufacturing jobs, as low-wage factories close and work moves to lower-wage factories in less affluent states or abroad. North Carolina, number one in the percentage of workers in manufacturing jobs in 1993, was number six in 2000. But manufacturing job losses have been overwhelmed by the rise in service jobs, and the unemployment rate is low enough that thousands of Latinos moved into North Carolina seeking jobs in construction and meat and chicken factories. The state's Hispanic population rose from 77,000 to 379,000 in a decade, the biggest percentage rise in any state. Yet for all its metropolitan growth, life in North Carolina has not lost its rural tone. This has always been thickly settled rural land, and if one is never out of sight of others there is also plenty of green space and reminders of rural roots, from barbecue stands to country Baptist churches to stock car tracks. North Carolina was once known for its large number of trailers, but mobile homes have now gone upscale; in 1990, two-thirds of the trailers sold were singlewides, but in 2000 three-quarters of those sold were doublewides, and most were sold not as personal property but as real estate: Manufactured homes. Tarheels can live surrounded by forests or farms and yet be within an hour's drive of huge shopping centers and thousands of workplaces.

Change has not been directed from any single establishment; the forces that have produced it are diverse and sometimes hostile. North Carolina does have a small and articulate elite, which looks for guidance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the historically liberal editors of the state's newspapers, most prominently the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer. Quite different attitudes are nurtured by tradition-minded churches in a state where churchgoing is deeply ingrained, endorsed for years through Sunday blue laws and strengthened periodically by religious revivals. North Carolina's Billy Graham remains a strong voice for revealed religion; he all but endorsed George W. Bush in 2000, and his son Franklin Graham delivered the invocation at Bush's inauguration. When North Carolina was an economically backward state, infant mortality was common, indoor plumbing was not, and religion was a fountain of hope and a source of discipline; it is still, perhaps even more, in this now bustling air-conditioned, cable- and computer-wired commonwealth.

North Carolina has grown with the aid of both its progressive and tradition-minded citizens, and in spite of--sometimes because of--the polarized politics that has developed between the two sides. North Carolina's professionals tend to share progressive values; its businessmen and conservative Protestants tend to share tradition-minded values. Both groups have contributed to the state's economic dynamism and cultural energy. Liberal progressivism has provided an impetus toward building good schools and universities and highways and amenities like the nation's first state-funded symphony and state high schools for science and mathematics and the arts. North Carolina's education reforms, including stringent testing and bonuses for teachers in high-performing schools, made it one of the two states (the other was Texas) with the biggest gains in reading and math test scores in first half of the 1990s. The stringent testing has increased the number of dropouts, but it also means that a North Carolina high school diploma means something. The slowing economy led to increases in state university tuitions, but they are still a bargain by national standards.

From these two strands of North Carolina tradition developed a polarized, increasingly party-line politics that is pretty evenly balanced, waged partly on economic issues but even more on cultural attitudes. It is a politics in which Democrats and Republicans have been distinctive, sometimes bitter in their rivalries, for years not overlapping in their ideas but by the mid-1990s converging on at least some issues. This politics was built on historic partisan patterns: Coastal North Carolina settlers tended to be British Anglicans who became Methodists, slaveholders who supported the Confederacy and voted Democratic; Piedmont settlers tended to be Scots-Irish Presbyterians with a scattering of Germans sects, Union men in 1861 and Republicans ever after. The most effective paladins of both traditions for the last quarter century, Republican Senator Jesse Helms and Democratic Governor Jim Hunt, were each elected to statewide office five times over 25 years, and in 1984 waged what was then the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history; once bitter rivals, they later reconciled, and worked together on some issues. Now they have both retired from office, Hunt from the governorship after four non-consecutive terms in 2000, Helms from the Senate seat after five terms in 2002.

Most elections here have been decided by relatively narrow margins. Bill Clinton lost North Carolina twice, by less than 1% in 1992 and by 5% in 1996; in 2000, this was not a seriously contested state, and George W. Bush beat Al Gore by 56%-43%. Hunt won his last term as governor in 1996 with 56% and was succeeded in 2000 by Democrat Mike Easley, who beat Republican Richard Vinroot 52%-46%. In 1998 Democrat John Edwards upset Senator Lauch Faircloth 51%-47%, and in 2002 Republican Elizabeth Dole, living in her 100-year-old mother's house in Salisbury, beat Democrat Erskine Bowles, once Clinton's chief of staff, by 54%-45%. In 1994 Republicans took control of the North Carolina House; in 1998 Democrats took it back; in 2002 Republicans won back the state House, though a post-election party switch left the House evenly divided. This is not a state of political landslides.

North Carolina's electorate breaks along cultural, not economic lines. In the 2000 exit poll blacks, who are 21% of the population, were overwhelmingly Democratic (90% for Al Gore), while white Protestants were heavily Republican (72% for George W. Bush). Those with non-Christian or no religion voted 64%-31% for Gore, but made up only a small proportion of the electorate. Geographically, this means the centers of the Piedmont urban areas, filling up with professionals and with significant black populations, have trended Democratic; the counties farther out, filling up with middle-income families working in decentralized businesses, have switched from historic Democratic preferences to solid Republican ones. Coastal east Carolina, once overwhelmingly Democratic, is now mixed; smaller counties in and near the western mountains are heavily Republican. The result is a close balance between two cultural and political blocs which have contributed to North Carolina's unanticipated growth--though neither is inclined to give the other much credit.