Daily Kos: North Carolina Results Analysis --Nov 10, 2012
This article was posted in GD but thought I'd post it here in case some have missed this more optimistic Daily Kos analysis of NC results:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/10/1158518/-North-Carolina-Results-Analysis-In-Narrow-Loss-NC-Shows-it-is-a-Legitimately-Purple-Swing-State
Check out the excellent maps in this article:
North Carolina's Continued Democratic Trend
In 2008, President Obama defeated John McCain by 52.87% to, 45.60%, with a margin of 7.27%. So subtracting Obama's 2012 margin of roughly 2.38%, we find that the overall national swing was a 4.89% margin shift to Romney.
But in North Carolina, the swing to Romney was substantially less than that - only 2.49%. Subtracting 2.49% from 4.89%, we find that the trend relative to the national average in North Carolina was 2.4% towards Obama. That means that if there had been no overall national swing to Romney, Obama would have likely improved his margin in North Carolina by about 2.4% (which would have meant a win in NC by 2.7%, up from his .3% win in 2008). In other words, North Carolina showed in 2012 that it is continuing to trend Democratic.
Now, how does that 2.4% Democratic trend break down by county?:
This is the map I like 
= new reply since forum marked as read
whereas (for example) Wake went slightly down 
This map shows the NC trend AS COMPARED TO THE NATIONAL trend (Dems may still have lost the county but are gaining ground even so)--read the whole article to fully understand what's happening.
In other words this has good implications for the future.
