After North Carolina voted for Barack Obama in 2008, there was broad speculation that the Tar Heel state would join Virginia as an emerging blue bastion. That hasn’t happened in the intervening time period. While Virginia followed a swift path to Democratic stronghold status, North Carolina saw Democrats come up short cycle after cycle to the point where Republicans have a solid hold on the state at most levels. Some national analysts have concluded that North Carolina is “persistently right-of-center” and not likely to behave as a blue-trending state like the Old Dominion. But there is another model for turning a Southern state blue that has been executed in North Carolina’s southernmost neighbor, Georgia.

Comparisons to Virginia were always based on a misreading of each state’s demographics. Yes, both states are growing and diversifying, but the demographic topography of these states differs in an important way. North Carolina retains one of the largest rural populations in the country, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of population, while rural parts of Virginia, such as the Appalachians and the sparsely populated tidewater, exercise much less influence over state politics. Meanwhile, Northern Virginia has gotten big enough to simply outvote the rest of the state. In North Carolina, the urban cores are not yet big enough to overwhelm the state’s droves of rural conservative voters.

There is a further difference in the urban parts of the state. In addition to being bigger as a proportion of Virginia’s population, NoVa is more “urban” than North Carolina’s I-85 corridor. Northern Virginia is a big, relatively dense inner-ring suburb protruding southward from the Boston-Washington corridor. In contrast, North Carolina’s conurbations are, in the words of one scholar, “countrypolitan,” less dense and more tied to their agricultural roots. The countrypolitan parts of North Carolina are trending blue in small increments, but their political culture is fundamentally more conservative than Northern Virginia’s urban-suburbs.

Virginia is thus becoming more and more of a typical northeastern states with small, politically irrelevant remnants of Southernness. North Carolina is more culturally Southern and rural, and likely will not become an extension of the BOS-WASH megalopolis for at least another decade. This all sounds fairly pessimistic from the perspective of Democrats. But Georgia, too, has become a purple and perhaps even blue-leaning state through a difference confluence of forces.

As North Carolina was voting for Barack Obama, Georgia opted for John McCain by 5.2%. Over the next two cycles, the state came closer and closer to the national Democratic margin, reflecting organic demographic trends. But then Stacey Abrams intervened. In a matter of just a couple years, her group Fair Fight registered 800,000 new Democratic voters. In 2018 she almost defeated a conservative Republican for the governorship, and in 2020 the trend culminated in a Democratic victory in the state. Democrats control the U.S. Senate because of Stacey Abrams.

Like Georgia, North Carolina has had a decades-long history of voting for Republicans at the federal level. But the state has the exact same number of eligible nonwhite voters who are not registered–800,000–that Abrams tapped in her successful efforts to turn the Peach State blue. If Democrats get these voters registered, they will become pretty likely to vote, especially if the Democratic effort is reinforced by get-out-the-vote initiatives. A stubborn Democratic establishment may be tempted to hold onto the persuasion-based, swing voter-oriented strategy they have tried unsuccessfully throughout the 21st century, and to tell themselves that demographics will eventually save the day. That’s wrong. North Carolina Democrats’ Virginia dream has been delayed for years, but Georgia-style success is well within reach.