Suburban Charlotte turned on Pat McCrory

And became largely responsible for (likely) putting a new person in the governor’s mansion, an Agenda analysis of data from the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections shows.

Four years ago, Gov. Pat McCrory — at the time the popular former Charlotte mayor — banked comfortable margins among affluent suburban voters in his race against Democart Walter Dalton.

Here’s how the governor map looked in 2012.

And here’s how it turned out in 2016. Note the new swaths of blue in the northern part of the county, around Lake Norman; in Ballantyne, along Monroe Road,  and in the SouthPark/Cotswold/Pineville-Matthews Road area.

The same trends held true in other urban areas.

Forsyth (where Winston-Salem is), New Hanover (Wilmington), Watauga (Boone), Wake (Raleigh) and Chatham (suburban Triangle) all flipped from red to blue in 2016.

2012 map:

2016 map:

2016 map

One interesting note: McCrory did better in Charlotte than statewide compared with Donald Trump.

One of the biggest oddities of the results was the discrepancy in votes between Trump and McCrory. Statewide, Trump pulled about 60,000 total mores votes — meaning that people were voting for Trump but not for McCrory.

But that wasn’t the case in McCrory’s hometown. Voters in considerable numbers voted for McCrory but not for Trump. McCrory ended up with about 5,600 more votes than Trump did in Mecklenburg County.