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RALEIGH — Now that the counting of ballots is more-or-less complete, let’s take another look back at the results of the 2024 elections — with a particular emphasis on contests closer to the bottom than the top of the ballot.

Why look at down-ballot races? Well, I admit to a longstanding annoyance with conflating the election of a president with the election of “the government.” When presidential races are very important, America has neither a king nor a parliament.
Voters hire the president of the United States to run the executive branch of the federal government for a limited time. We hire hundreds of additional federal politicians to staff the legislative branch. A hundred of them, senators, also play a role in staffing the other two federal branches through advice and confirmation.
But we elect thousands of politicians to state office — legislators, executives, and judges — and a staggering half a million politicians to local office! They aren’t provincial functionaries. They do not serve, or derive their power from, national politicians. And their decisions routinely affect our daily lives in ways that federal policies don’t (or shouldn’t).
Generally speaking, Republicans had the better election cycle in 2024. Donald Trump was reelected to the White House with a sizable, though hardly historic, majority in the Electoral College and a modest 1.6 point plurality in votes cast nationwide (49.9% vs. 48.3% for Kamala Harris). Republicans retook the U.S. Senate with 53 seats and retained a narrow majority in the U.S. House.
At the state level, neither party flipped a gubernatorial seat. Republicans will still hold 27 of the nation’s gubernatorial offices and enjoy a “trifecta” — governor and both houses of a state legislature — in 23 states, the same number as before. Democrats lost two such trifectas, in Michigan and Minnesota.
Across the country, legislative turnover was rather low. Before Election Day, Republicans held 55% of the seats in state legislatures. At this writing, it looks like they’ll account for 55.25% of seats when legislatures reconvene next year.
Here in North Carolina, our results largely mirror the national trend. Republicans won most statewide contests, as they have for several cycles, although most of the winning margins were small and Democrats netted a seat on the 10-member Council of State. Josh Stein’s blowout victory over Mark Robinson in the gubernatorial race was a clear outlier. The default position for our state’s electorate is a slight Republican edge — making us neither ruby red nor ambivalently violet but something closer to the reddish-purple color called, appropriately, “flirt.”
Do favorable district maps accentuate Republican victories for General Assembly? Absolutely. But they don’t manufacture them from whole (purple) cloth. Because Democratic-leaning voters tend to be concentrated in urban counties and Republican-leaning voters are more spread out across suburban, exurban, and rural areas, any district maps based on geography — rather than ones manipulated to produce parliamentary-style proportionality — will pose a problem for Democrats at the present moment.
I’m old enough to remember when the opposite was the case, when large swaths of the state were dominated by Democrats and Republican hopes for legislative wins hinged on strong turnout in the inner suburbs of urban counties.
County commissions present a stark reminder of how North Carolina’s political fundamentals have changed. Democrats controlled the vast majority of local governments when I was young. Then, in the 1990s, Republicans started winning county and even municipal races in such improbable places as Wake, Durham, Guilford, and Cumberland counties.
During the first two decades of the 21st century, the urban cores themselves reverted to Democratic bastions, in part because Republican-leaning voters moved to the outer suburbs of surrounding counties, painting them in ever-deepening shades of red. And many rural voters switched parties altogether.
This year, Republicans won majorities on four more county commissions, leaving them with 71 out of 100. While some, such as Forsyth and New Hanover, contain large cities or thickly populated suburbs, most are rural and sparsely populated. Welcome to modern North Carolina politics.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member.