Special Report: North Carolina's biggest overperformers and underperformers

We ranked 329 candidates for office by how much better — or worse — they did than their party's presidential candidate in 2024

When you’re running a down-ballot race, so much depends on the top of the ticket. Presidential candidates drive turnout and shape the perception voters have on the entire party.

That’s why we so often talk about coattails. The phenomenon is real, and it’s powerful. It’s why Jim Holshouser and Jim Martin were able to break through as Republican candidates for governor, riding the coattails of Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

And to a large extent, these national dynamics are why Republicans took over the General Assembly in the 2010 election.

But the top of the ticket doesn’t tell the whole story. Individual candidates can and often do break out of the mold — either to their advantage or to their detriment.

Longleaf Politics analyzed the precinct-by-precinct results of the 2024 election to determine which down-ballot candidates differed the most from their party’s presidential candidate.

If a Republican candidate earned more votes than President Donald Trump did from the same district, we say he overperformed. On the flip side, if a Democratic candidate got fewer votes than Kamala Harris in that district, he underperformed.

Let’s dive in.

Council of State overperformers and underperformers

The statewide candidates are fairly easy to figure out. You only have to look at the state-level vote totals, so I’ll list them first to help you more easily understand how the analysis works.

What this shows is that North Carolina voters had a very different perception of statewide Democrats than they did of former Vice President Harris.

This is not very surprising. The North Carolina Democratic Party maintains some of the residual goodwill of decades of control of state politics, and its brand is way stronger than that of a California Democrat serving alongside an unpopular president.

I didn’t include the statewide judicial races because they’re not all that illustrative. Only Justice Allison Riggs overperformed her party’s presidential candidate, exceeding Harris’s vote total by about 55,000 votes (2%).

This is also not surprising. A relatively small but significant number of voters do not finish their entire ballot, so there is naturally an element of drop-off as you work your way down the list. Judicial races are normally low-information and have a higher level of drop-off.

North Carolina’s top legislative overperformers

If you’re only looking at raw numbers, the top of the list is dominated by candidates who ran unopposed¹. Nineteen of the top 20 are Democrats, and 12 of them are from Mecklenburg County.

Because this isn’t a true representation of who overperformed, I’ve omitted those candidates from the ranking below.

Here are the candidates who performed the strongest in competitive races when compared with the top of their ticket.

There are a lot of different reasons a person can end up on this list, but the one general thread is that they all ran excellent campaigns. One in particular stands out.

Krista Bokhari ran in a suburban Charlotte district that’s moved hard to the left in the last few cycles — and voters there are vehemently anti-Trump. She could be an exemplar for how to run this type of race in future years.

You can dig more into the data below².

Note: An earlier version of this article had a chart of underperforming legislative candidates. Since so many of the candidates at the bottom of the list have issues with split precincts clouding the data, I’ve removed it.

Premium readers have the opportunity to see and download the full dataset, which ranks 329 different candidates for office and includes more data fields, including the raw vote total differences. Subscribe now to get instant access.