Last week we wrote about the historic sweep of Black sheriff’s candidates in (and beyond) the state’s seven largest counties.
This week Jordan Green of Triad City Beat has a good piece about from where the votes in two of those counties – Guilford and Forsyth – seem to have come. From the piece:
As a gauge of the shift in voter sentiment, Democrat Danny Rogers made up 8.7 points in his rematch with Republican BJ Barnes in the Guilford County sheriff’s race, compared to his previous bid in 2014. And in the at-large race for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board, where voters can select up to three candidates, the Democratic contenders went from an aggregate of 49.5 percent of the vote in 2014 to 55.6 percent this year.
Victorious Democrats in both counties saw some of their most dramatic gains in predominantly white, Republican-leaning precincts in the suburbs. Rogers more than doubled his votes — from 489 to 1,108 in SDRI, a sprawling precinct at the western end of Guilford County that includes the Piedmont Triad Farmers Market. And in a handful of precincts around Lewisville and Clemmons at the west end of Forsyth County, Democrat candidates increased their aggregate vote counts by upwards of 50 percent.
Take the time to read the whole piece, which gets into some of the possible roots of this change.
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