John Dinon is professor of political science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His books include The American State Constitutional Tradition and he is the editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism. North Carolina has two Republican senators, a Republican governor, and a strong majority of Republicans in its U.S. House delegation in and both houses of its state legislature. Yet it voted for Obama in 2008 and nearly did so in 2012. Is North Carolina better thought of as a red state or a purple state? In presidential elections North Carolina has become a highly competitive state, in a way that it was not competitive as recently as a decade ago. One way of tracking this change is to consider the difference in support for Republican presidential candidates in North Carolina compared with the nation as a whole. In 2000 and 2004, Republican presidential candidates enjoyed 12 percentage-point and 10 percentage-point advantages, respectively, when comparing North Carolina and the nation. By 2008 and 2012, this narrowed to 7-percentage-point and 6 percentage-point differences, respectively, between North Carolina and
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