Outside of the presidential race, Democrats had a good election in North Carolina

With the glaring exception of the presidential race , North Carolina Democrats had a good 2024 election.

While Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in the battleground state by more than 3 percentage points, Democrats won nearly every other statewide race that was on the ballot Tuesday.

Those results largely comport with decades of political trends in North Carolina. But Democrats and Republicans alike also attributed them to Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's disastrous campai g n for governor , which was constantly plagued by his long history of incendiary remarks.

"We squarely blame Mark Robinson for losses in races that Republicans would and should have otherwise won," said a North Carolina GOP operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

As was expected, Democrat Josh Stein overwhelmingly defeated Robinson in the race for governor, winning by nearly 15 percentage points.

Democrats also eked out narrow wins in the races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction .

In the contest to replace Robinson as lieutenant governor , Democrat Rachel Hunt defeated Republican Hal Weatherman by 1.6 percentage points. In the contest to replace Stein as attorney general , Democrat Jeff Jackson beat Republican Dan Bishop by 2.6 points.

In the secretary of state's race , incumbent Democrat Elaine Marshall defeated Republican Chad Brown by 1.9 points to win her eighth term. And in the state superintendent's race , Democrat Maurice Green defeated Republican Michele Morrow by 2.1 points to replace Republican Catherine Truitt, whom Morrow defeated in the primary this year.

Democrats also seemed poised Friday to flip a seat in the Legislature that would break up Republicans' supermajority — and the power to override vetoes that comes with it. That race remains too close to call, according to The Associated Press , but the Democrat led the Republican on Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, in a state Supreme Court race, Republican Jefferson Griffin led Democratic Justice Allison Riggs by two-tenths of a percentage point (about 10,000 votes) with 96% of the vote counted. NBC News has n't yet call ed the race .

For decades, voters in North Carolina have shown a propensity to elect Republicans for federal office while supporting Democrats in downballot statewide races.

But Democrats said linking Republicans to the scandal-plagued Robinson was another important factor in their party's narrow wins this week.

Robinson's embattled candidacy "certainly helped" Democrats downballot, said Sam Newton, a spokesperson for the Democratic Governors Association.

While Newton also credited Stein's campaign and vision, he said the results showed that "Democrats, Republicans and independents" were "disgusted with Mark Robinson's extremism."

"That is something that clearly benefited Democrats up and down the ballot," he said.

A Democratic operative in North Carolina, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: "If you look at the people who were running in those races, they were kind of similar — prototypes, kind of — to Robinson." The operative mentioned specific speeches by Weatherman, as well as specific social media posts by Morrow.

"There were a lot of attempts to tie the downballot candidates to Robinson, and I think it was successful for the candidates that were most similar to him," the operative said.

A Robinson campaign spokesperson didn't respond to questions.

Democrats in the state and nationally aggressively tied Republicans up and down the ballot in North Carolina to Robinson amid a constant unearthing of controversial remarks he had made. Those efforts were further ramped up after CNN reported that Robinson made inflammatory comments on the message board of a pornography website, which he denied.

National Democrats also tried to extend that strategy to the presidential race, with the Democratic National Committee launching a cascade of ads linking Robinson to Trump immediately after the CNN report. But Trump's victory suggested that approach didn't bear fruit at the presidential level.

The varying results, however, largely fit with long-standing political trends in the Southern battleground, particularly the tendency of its voters to simultaneously support Republican presidential candidates and Democratic candidates for governor.

North Carolina, which holds its races for governor in presidential election years, has voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election but one since 1980. Over the same stretch, all but two of the governors elected have been Democrats.

Meanwhile, North Carolina has elected only one Republican attorney general since 1901 and only one secretary of state who wasn't a Democrat since 1877. The political party of the state's elected lieutenant governors has been more mixed in recent decades.

"Welcome to the political legacy and history and trajectory of North Carolina politics. It's just who and what the state is," said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College near Charlotte. "It's baked into our political DNA."

Newton, of the Democratic Governors Association, said that in North Carolina in particular, "there's always separation between federal and state races." He said that manifested again this year, with the races for governor and other downballot offices boiling down to local issues, education and abortion rights.

Bitzer also offered a blunt additional assessment of why Democrats' efforts to tie Robinson to Republican candidates worked in other races but not against Trump.

"Trump's got Teflon," he said. "The rest of them don't."