GAston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. A few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South supported Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the record was reached by Barack Obama with 37% of the vote in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s projects the last campaign ends as he worked to increase participation. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority Republican city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside City Hall.

And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and rushing to hear Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the US Capitol. on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling — like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease — but it’s one of 29 Kamala Harris campaign field offices across state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by investing energy in red counties, they can form a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.

Read: The surreal experience of being a Republican at the DNC

This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chairman David Wilson Brown told me. He would know: he led two quixotic campaigns for US House in the region. “We were thrilled to hear they wanted to establish themselves here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m glad they’re paying attention here.”

North Carolina is sometimes presented as a state divided along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that is too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he characterizes as “countrypolitan.” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as a supplement at Duke.) Sometimes called peri-urban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They always want to think they live in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte.” They want the values ​​to be like this.

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden decisively won North Carolina’s 10 largest counties, while Trump easily won rural counties. But Trump’s victory in the state — by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes — was decided in rural counties, where he received 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose fewer of them to take the state as a whole. It’s here, not in rural areaswhere North Carolina will be won and lost.

For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by raise the score in the cities. This strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works – and it was flouted in Charlotte, as PolicyMichael Kruse writes– it offers a unique and narrow path to victory. It also means dropping many other local elections, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state Legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can continue to squeeze more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte — I wanted to squeeze as much as possible, but I’m just worried that it won’t get enough votes,” he told me. McCorkle.

So why now? The countrypolitan counties are no longer what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming increasingly racially diverse, with about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of these newcomers landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrusand Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movements within the state are also important. As cities like Charlotte grow and expand outward, younger, more liberal people come with them.

(A telling sign of the arrival of young liberals: luxury loft apartments in a renovated Gastonia textile mill, the scene of a 1929 union dispute that resulted in the deaths of a union organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing old and new factory residents share is the likelihood of voting Democratic.)

Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a deli and bottle shop that I visited back in the day. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal battle stemming from the drag shows he hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama for Harris rally last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s landlords, attributed it to a cultural backlash.

“We created a place where people could come and see that there weren’t just white, cis humans living in this city,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris showed up to introduce himself. When Biden won, when Trump was indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people are gathering at the store and kind of celebrating, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that makes them happy. »

By 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and as I walked around downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I walked past a cat cafe, an upscale department store, and a hip coffee shop — exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar-themed artwork — all of which had opened in the last year and a half . But almost as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape transformed into small farms, many of which sported Trump signs.

However, not everyone who settles in these counties is liberal. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states attracted by economic opportunities, better climate, lower taxes and, of course, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep blue cities, so they land in rural counties. They fit in among existing residents who are neither wealthy country club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.

Still, some of these more conservative voters — generally white, college-educated and better off — could turn Democratic, or at least that’s what Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s 2016 victory, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican suburban residents, sometimes offsetting the Republican Party’s gains among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is also lobbying for them or, failing that, hoping they will stay home and not vote for Trump.

“There is a wide range of voters in North Carolina who may not be die-hard liberals, but who do not want – and in many cases reject – the kind of extreme politics that Donald represents Trump,” Harris battleground Dan Kanninen said. -state director, told me.

The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning over these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial share of the vote in the presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary votes, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County and 21.1 percent in the Gaston County. If just a small portion of Haley’s voters in North Carolina defected to Harris, it could swing the race.

Topping the list is Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia. A former Mecklenburg County GOP board member in Charlotte, he moved farther away in search of affordable housing. Its policy has also evolved. He had supported Trump in the past, but supported Haley in the 2024 primaries. He is now the Republican leader for Harris.

Read: Trump’s fate rests in countrypolitan counties

“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really sends a resounding message. You are not welcome in the Republican Party”, he told me. “Many Republican women are appalled by the crimes, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion for women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that the “fathers of football” were moving away from Trump for the moment. same reasons.

Some polls suggest a broader pattern of what Tucker saw up close. A national survey published earlier this month by Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to supporting Trump, while 36 percent supported Harris.

However, potential voters are not the same as actual voters, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, chairman of the Gaston County Democratic Party, told me he hopes Democrats can reach 41 or 42 percent of the vote this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can achieve this, she’ The inauguration will probably take place on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after my visit, a Harris sign outside the field office was demolished-for the second time. Gaston County remains a tough place to be a Democrat.