Back to Blue? Shifting Tides of Red and Blue and the Dole-Hagan Senate Race in North Carolina

Abstract

At the start of the 2008 election cycle, not many observers or analysts would have predicted that Senator Elizabeth Dole would lose her seat. Indeed, in their January 2008 analysis of U.S. Senate races, the non-partisan Cook Political Report rated Dole’s seat “solid Republican.” However, the dynamics in North Carolina began to change and Dole was on the long list of Republicans who had the potential to lose; by May the race had shifted to the “likely Republican” category, by the end of summer Dole’s seat was classified as “lean Republican,” and in the middle of the fall campaign it was judged as a “toss up.” This article explores the contest between Elizabeth Dole and Kay Hagan by tracing the factors that allowed this apparently “safe” Republican seat to be captured by Democrats in 2008. While we discuss a number of factors that help to explain Hagan’s victory, we suggest that a changing partisan electoral environment resulting from the immigration of non-Southerners to the state not only favored this outcome, but may auger well for the Democratic Party in the future. In other words, a state that had shifted red during the past several decades may be reverting back to blue.