There’s been a conversation on Twitter about whether Cal Cunningham jilted the Democratic Party. Many Democrats believe that Cunningham’s selfishness and narcissism cost the party a vital Senate seat, landing them in the quagmire of Manchin-Sinema obstructionism, but election analyst J. Miles Coleman insists that Cunningham would have lost the election no matter what. A number of people have fallen in line behind his judgment.

Personally, I’m agnostic. Tillis has been remarkably unpopular ever since he ascended to the arena of statewide politics, and polling consistently showed that North Carolinians wanted him gone. Throughout the summer and early of fall of 2020, the polls had Cunningham ahead, often by wide margins. And Tillis’s own pollster and chief consultant have attributed the Republican’s victory to the Cunningham affair. However, recent trends in polarization have made it exceedingly difficult for a Senate candidate to defeat his opponent when the other party carries the state at the presidential level. Your mileage may vary.

But what this rather academic debate underscores is the entrenched structural challenge facing North Carolina Democrats. The state only leans Republican by two or three points, as demonstrated by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s PVI rating. Every election without Steve Troxler on the ballot seems to be decided by 4 points or less, with most deciding margins coming in under 100,000 votes out of millions cast. The state should, by any consideration, be winnable for the Donkey Party. But Democrats have come up short for a decade.

No to posture as faux-oracular, but the primary reason for the party’s difficulties lies in the polarization of the state’s electorate. As analysts have noted, North Carolina is one of the most “inelastic” swing states in the country. That means that the vast majority of voters will opt for their preferred party under almost any circumstances; there’s very little “give” allowing Democrats or Republicans to win voters who usually lean the other way. With millions of voters dug into their partisan preferences, even a small Republican lean (which is all they have) has been enough for the GOP to win time and again, even though their victories are tissue-thin by the standards of most of the South.

This polarizing trend has accelerated markedly in the last twenty years. In the late 1990s, swing voters made up as much as 20% of the North Carolina electorate. Now that number is no higher than 10%, and may be as low as 5%. In 2004, Mike Easley won the gubernatorial election by 12% while George W. Bush carried the state by an equal margin. Also, racial polarization has followed a disturbing trajectory of growing worse. Harvey Gantt won 38% of the white vote in his 1996 challenge to Senator Jesse Helms. Democrats would be thrilled to attain that margin today.

Polarization along racial and geographical lines is the single greatest challenge facing North Carolina Democrats. They’ll have to soften up the state’s polarization if they want to return to power in the state. That said, they do not need as much elasticity as was the case in the days of Easley and Gantt. State elections are close enough that even a small diminution of the polarizing trend could be enough to give Democrats a shot at winning, particularly when the national environment is favorable to their party. In the meantime, we’ll all wonder what Senator Cal Cunningham would have looked like.