Inside the Numbers: Governor's Race

In 2004 Mike Easley beat Patrick Ballantine by about 444,000 votes. In 2008 Bev Perdue beat Pat McCrory by about 145,000 voters.

That means McCrory cut the Democratic margin of victory by 299,000 votes...but where did they come from?

A new PPP analysis finds that 226,000 of the 299,000 vote shift from the previous election came exclusively within the counties of the Charlotte tv market.

There were 13 counties where Perdue ran ten points or more behind Easley's 2004 performance and 12 of them were in metro Charlotte. The exception was Brunswick County, where Easley lives:

County	Perdue 2008%	Easley 2004%	Difference
Lincoln	30	46	16
Iredell	33	47	14
Stanly	32	46	14
Cabarrus	35	48	13
Union	29	41	12
Catawba	33	45	12
Cleveland	42	54	12
Alexander	33	45	12
Brunswick	45	56	11
Caldwell	35	45	10
Gaston	35	45	10
Mecklenburg	49	59	10
Rowan	37	47	10

Overall Perdue won in every media market in the state except for Charlotte:

TV Market	Perdue	McCrory	Margin
Wilmington	51	45	+6
Greenville	58	40	+18
Triangle	56	41	+15
Triad	49	47	+2
Charlotte	41	57	-16
Asheville	51	46	+5

There were 22 counties where Perdue exceeded Easley's performance from 2004. All of them were in eastern North Carolina except Swain County in the west.

The bottom line? While Pat McCrory did surprisingly well last fall, he was too much of a regional candidate to get across the finish line. If he's going to run statewide again in the future he's going to need to do a much better job of appealing to voters outside his home base in metro Charlotte, particularly rural voters east of I-95.

One other interesting finding from our analysis. We pointed out several times last fall that our data showed Michael Munger was pulling more votes from Perdue than McCrory, contrary to the conventional wisdom that Libertarians take from Republican candidates. The county where he ended up doing best? Deep blue Orange, where he pulled 5% of the vote.