Why Hagan Lost, Visualized

by | Nov 20, 2014 | 2014 Elections, Carolina Strategic Analysis, Features, NC Politics, US Senate | 15 comments

Below is a map of the change in margin between Obama/Romney 2012 and Hagan/Tillis 2014. The counties in red are where Tillis improved on Romney’s performance. Because Romney won NC, Tillis had a little more room for error than Hagan, who had to make up for Obama’s 2.04% loss somewhere. (Click the image for full size.)

romney tillis map

The percentages refer to margin of victory. For example, Obama won Wake County by 11.44%. Hagan won it by 13.41%, a 1.97% improvement on Obama’s margin, so it’s colored the lightest blue on the map.

Overall, Hagan underperformed Obama in 34 of 100 counties. Her biggest underperformance was in Robeson, where Romney lost by 17 points; Tillis cut that deficit in half. Robeson is a heavily nonwhite county and the mix of conservative, rural whites and an apathetic Democratic base probably contributed to Tillis’s better numbers there.

Hagan’s greatest overperformance of Obama was in Graham County, in the far western part of the state. That’s a very small, rural county (and also, worth mentioning, in the Chattanooga, Tennessee media market). The Mountains in the Asheville media market is one area where Hagan did much better than Obama overall. It’s almost all blue. The reason for that is there are still a lot of white Democrats who tend to be conservative, culturally – they voted heavily for Amendment 1 and against Obama. But Tillis may have been a bridge too far for them. The yachts and jet owners attacks and the depiction of the Speaker as a guy looking out for the wealthiest 1% hurt him here.

Probably the most significant county where Tillis improved on Romney’s numbers was in Guilford County, which is actually Hagan’s home county. My guess is that African American turnout was through the roof there in 2012 but dwindled in 2014.

There’s also a pattern of Tillis doing significantly better than Romney in counties containing large military bases – Wayne, Cumberland, and Onslow. I’m not sure why that is. Possibly these counties are younger than average and they didn’t turn out, so many potential Hagan voters stayed home. Then again, maybe they wanted a stronger foreign policy and were particularly aggrieved by Hagan’s skipping the ISIS briefing. Maybe both.

Cumberland deserves special mention because that’s another huge county where it appears lagging African American turnout was a huge factor. That’s not to say that overall, black turnout was far below what Hagan needed to win. It was 21% or 22%, a record for a midterm. It was just below 2012 levels and Hagan probably needed that to survive.

The Northeastern part of the state is interesting. It’s very red, meaning Tillis did much better here than Romney did. Probably this is another indication of African Americans sitting out the election, but interestingly the reddest counties there (Chowan, Perquimans) don’t have nearly as large a black population as some of the others. Some of this area is in the Norfolk media market, so spending disparities there, either in 2012 or 2014, could be a factor. Then again, you have Camden County, where Hagan did much better than Obama did.

I hope you found this post to be informative. Let me know if there are any mistakes in the map, and be sure to comment if there’s anything you think deserves mentioning.

15 Comments

  1. Sandy Lusk

    We have a cabin in Swain county, just next door to Graham County. I saw lots of signs for “frack free NC” and No fracking in Western North Carolina. There was a tremendous amount of distrust for those who supported fracking ( Republicans) – Tillis was for fracking and this cost him. Tillis had signs all over the place, and Hagan was awol. I believe one of the factors of why she won was because folks in this area rely on well water and springs, they cannot have their water poisoned by politicians. Saw Hagan ads on t.v. but can’t recall seeing her signs along the road.

  2. George Greene

    To me, this says that Guilford and Mecklenburg are 2/3 of the story. If they had been even light blue like Wake, it would’ve been a huge difference because their populations are so huge. The third 1/3 is the black belt, approximately G.K.Butterfield’s cong.dist.#1. This is arguably the poorest area of the entire state. It is losing population and has a whole lot of poor people of both races who feel simply left behind by the progress in the blue urban centers. These areas are strongly Democratic demographically and down-ballot, so local offices are never hotly contested in November in this area (opposite from what happened in Wake county, where turnout was fairly high, including among black voters). What this says to me is that EVERY Democrat who wants to win statewide MUST pay more attention to THE LEAST OF THESE, to the poorest, blackest, part of the state, because you neglect this area at your PERIL. Turnout in Warren county, the poorest blackest county in the WHOLE state, was *20%*, ranking 100th out of 100. There is also a closing statistic in the article that needs correcting. I am from Wake county (where turnout was 48%),and I do NOT believe for A MINUTE that black turnout was 21%. That IS JUST FALSE. The LOWEST-turnout county in the whole state had 20%. I think what the writer meant was that black voters were 21-22% of the voters in this election, which is good since we are only about 20% of the registered voters and only about 23% of the population of the state as a whole.

  3. Kent

    Your comment about Guilford worries me, since that is the county where there was documented vote-switching on the touch screens. How many of those “extra” Tillis votes were supposed to have been Hagan? We’ll never know…

    • hevans

      The touch screens switched votes for more than one candidate in Henderson County, but I heard that people just hit Cancel or Redo rather than call an official to document this.

    • cosmicjanitor

      This is exactly how republicans keep winning improbable election victories. With exit polls indicating that 64% of all voters in NC. favored a minimum wage increase, Tillis could not possibly have won this election. Like Stalin said: ‘I care not how anyone votes, only who counts the vote’ and ‘trade secret protections’ are preventing tabulation machines from being checked for accuracy; we have been seeing improbable republican victories in election after election. If any company disallows verification of the accuracy of their tabulation machines under these protections, then use of their machines should not be acceptable. Democracy demands oversight and transparency and no one can convince me that after watching what the republicans have been doing in the US. Congress and State Houses across the country – particularly in NC., that the American voters would be voting more republicans into office. The republicans have about a 30% approval rating nationwide and are generally loathed in the States they are governing – so what else could explain the improbable results we are seeing – over and above the fact that republican affiliated media outlets predominatethe airwaves?

  4. Chris

    Camden did well for Dems due local running for House.

  5. Mattie

    I wander, why spend $111million plus for this Senatorial race and we, in North Carolina have such poor education? I have a problem with that. Oh, let me add the unemployment too.

  6. charliereece

    This is great visualization work, thanks so much for putting this together. Until we get the final voter file from the state board of elections, we won’t really know much about the why behind these numbers, but this work is a great way to focus attention.

  7. Phil McMullan

    Perquimans and Chowan were traditionally Democrat counties, but they were conservative Democrats. This year both counties had active Republican parties with excellent party chairs. We returned our popular representative, Bob Steinberg, to the House. He helped all our other Republican candidates, including Tillis.
    Phil

  8. Tom

    Some of this is wrong and some is difficult to know until more examination of returns, including look at individual precincts. However, generally where there was a large African American registration turnout of all voters was at or above statewide turnout. Some disappointments on turnout: Mecklenburg, Watauga, Robeson, Hertford. Yet with turnout that underperformed statewide by five points, Mecklenburg produced a margin for Hagan of more than 50,000. Stanly county turnout was well above statewide turnout percentage. Interesting bit of election trivia: Republican vote in NC state senate races, NC state house races and congressional races about the same: 47% while Democratic vote ranged from 41% to 43%; Democrats won three of four statewide races with two-party competition (not counting Court of Appeal races where partisan competition not well advertised – if you did count those, Democrats did even better); percentage of those not voting for anyone ranged from 9 to 12 per cent. Canvass might change several of these percentages but not much if at all.

    • David Morgan, Secretary, Stanly County Democratic Party

      Speaker Tillis visited Stanly County for at least 2 rallies during the year.. Senator Hagan was last in Stanly County for about an hour in 2010…. which was maybe her only visit as a politician or Senator.

      • TJ Thompson

        What you describe isn’t unique to either Party nor their candidates. A lot of heavily red counties think Burr is totally out of touch, too.

    • George Greene

      The “wrongest” thing is “African-American turnout 21-22%”. What he actually means is that African-American voters constituted 21-22% of the voters in the election, which is good since we are only 22% of the population and are disproportionally deterred from voting. To achieve parity with our percentage in the population, we MUST have been trying harder overall, despite the under-performance in the black belt.

  9. David Morgan, Secretary, Stanly County Democratic Party

    If the Hagan Campaign ignored and treated other rural counties the same rude way they treated the Party in Stanly County; then that’s where she lost. Her Campaign Chair and others on her staff were told this over and over for almost a year. Those deaf ears cost her the 50,000 votes she needed.

  10. BlueNC

    This is extremely interesting. Thanks!

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