North Carolina pres race still up in the air

By SEAN MUSSENDEN
Media General News Service
Published: November 6, 2008

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WASHINGTON - North Carolina more than lived up to the battleground hype this year. But will it keep that swing state label in future presidential elections?

A full day after John McCain conceded the race to Barack Obama, the outcome in North Carolina remained in doubt Wednesday following the closest presidential contest in the state in at least 108 years.

Obama led McCain by a razor-thin margin - three-tenths of one percent or 13,746 votes out of a total of 4.23 million cast. Election officials were still processing provisional ballots that could - but were not expected to - prevent Obama from becoming the first Democrat to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Meanwhile, independent political analysts and strategists from both parties debated whether North Carolina would remain a battleground state in future presidential elections.

“It’s hard to tell whether this is a one time thing or the beginning of a long term trend,“ said Gary Pearce, a veteran Democratic strategist in Raleigh.

On the one hand, Pearce and others said, the migration of more highly educated workers to the state in recent years has helped tint a longtime red state in presidential elections more purple, and that trend that is expected to continue.

But, they said, a number of factors this year helped put North Carolina in play for Democrats that might not appear in future elections, including: a historically unpopular incumbent president, a tanking economy, and a history-making African-American candidate that boosted turnout of black voters, a key voting bloc.

“This was a perfect storm,“ Pearce said. “But clearly North Carolina has shown that under the right circumstances Democrats can indeed compete in the presidential race here.“

Most analysts said there was a strong chance the state would remain competitive in 2012 with Obama on the ballot. After that, the state’s battleground status could hinge on the national tone of the campaign.

If future elections turn on the economy, North Carolina could be tight, said veteran North Carolina Republican strategist Paul Shoemaker. If national security is the key issue, Democrats could have a hard time competing in the state, he said.

“The state is competitive, and it will probably stay competitive. But exactly how competitive will depend greatly on the dominant issue set in that particular election,“ he said.

Political analysts and pollsters also debated where North Carolina stands in the pantheon of battleground states.

Andy Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University, said he thought the state was not likely to mimic Florida or Ohio, states that proved decisive in 2000 and 2004 respectively and have been extremely important in recent elections.

Even with recent demographic trends favoring Democrats in North Carolina, he said he would expect the state to be a true battleground only in strong Democratic years like 2008.

“If you line up every state with the likelihood of it being that crucial 270th electoral vote, you’ll get states like Ohio, Florida, and then probably Colorado and Missouri before North Carolina,“ he said.

But Tom Jensen, of the Raleigh Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, said that this election showed North Carolina had “entered the top tier of swing states,“ one in which “it will be a very long time before a presidential candidate of either party is able to win by double digits.“

This year, the North Carolina victor will likely slide by with less than a single digit margin. It was not clear Wednesday how many provisional ballots were cast.

Gary Bartlett, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said that based on past elections he expected to receive about 40,000 provisional ballots this year, about 26,000 of which will count.
Historically, provisional ballots usually break along the same lines as regularly cast votes, he said.

If the current spread stays roughly the same, Obama will defeat McCain in North Carolina by the closest margin since at least 1900, according to statistics that date to that year maintained by the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill.