As a political strategist in 1990, Pope “Mac” McCorkle thought North Carolina was on the verge of turning blue.

Instead, it turned white.

McCorkle was then the assistant campaign manager for Harvey Gantt, a former Charlotte mayor and the Democratic Senate candidate challenging Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. Late in the campaign, North Carolina appeared ready to announce itself as a beacon of the New South by tossing the race-baiting Helms and electing the state’s first Black senator.

Then Helms’ camp rolled out the notorious ad in which a white man’s hands crumple a job rejection letter. “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified,” the narrator says. “But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

Despite Gantt leading in polls by as many as 8 points late in October, Helms won 53 percent to 47 percent.

McCorkle, now a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, has been flummoxed by North Carolina’s voting patterns ever since. Changing demographics suggest the state should be bluer now than in 1990, but Republicans still consistently win North Carolina in presidential and Senate races and they’ve come to dominate the state legislature.

In federal races, North Carolina hasn’t seen the shift to Democrats that took place in Virginia and, in 2020, in Georgia.

“I want to understand why there isn’t a durable Democratic majority in North Carolina,” McCorkle told me. Now he thinks he knows: Democrats, to borrow political advice from country singer Johnny Lee, have been “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

McCorkle said Democrats who think statewide victories will come from urban counties outvoting rural counties are overlooking the counties in between. He calls them “countrypolitan” counties located close to cities, but still voting with a small town tilt.

Working with Rachel Salzberg, a 2020 graduate of the Sanford master’s program, McCorkle has produced a report identifying 28 of these urban satellite counties where the wave of Democratic votes coming out of urban counties such as Wake and Mecklenburg “hit a very strong red wall.”

“There is an urban-rural divide, but if that was all that was going on in North Carolina, we would have already become a blue state,” he said.

McCorkle’s advice to Democrats is to focus on these edge counties and the pockets of Democrat voters often found in their county seats. The goal wouldn’t be to win the counties, but to lose them less badly.

But housing prices may already be doing that work for Democrats.

Lisa Walker, chair of the Union County Democratic Party, said her county adjacent to Mecklenburg remains dominated by Republicans, but more people who would usually live in urban Mecklenburg are moving into her more affordable county. Walker said, “We’re seeing a big wave of blue in precincts that abut Mecklenburg County.”

In Johnston County, adjacent to deep blue Wake County, Republicans still rule. But Sharon Castleberry, the Johnston County Democratic chair, said the votes coming out of new housing developments in the fast-growing county are trending her way.

“I do see a shift and it’s very subtle,” she said. “We are moving in the right direction and we’ll get there.”

Driving that change are developments such as Flowers Plantation, a 3,000-acre subdivision just east of Clayton. It could one day add 8,000 homes in a county with a current population of about 210,000.

That most red “countrypolitan” counties are destined to become bluer and more metropolitan appears inevitable, but McCorkle is wary of Democrats putting their faith in demographics shifting statewide votes their way.

“The Democrats would be well advised to be more strategic rather than depending on demography,” he said. “We’ve been waiting on it for 30 years.”