Like all former Confederate states, North Carolina would during its “Redemption” develop a politics based upon Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of its African-American population and dominance of the Democratic Party.

[4] Although North Carolina had never given women suffrage rights at any level of government before 1919, nor did its legislature consider the Nineteenth Amendment when it passed the Federal House and Senate, during 1920 the state passed by more a more than three-to-one margin a constitutional amendment that made it the first former Confederate state to abolish its poll tax.

[7] The abolition of the poll tax and women's suffrage, as it turned out, would cause in North Carolina amongst the largest mobilizations of new voters in the Union.

[8] Although Republican nominee Warren G. Harding had urged the state's mountain Republican legislators to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment,[9] neither Harding nor Democratic nominee and Ohio Governor James M. Cox did any campaigning in a state which had voted Democratic at every election since 1876.

However, at the end of October the GOP, sensing a landslide, believed based on an early Rexall straw poll that it had a chance of carrying North Carolina as well as Tennessee[a] for its first victory in a former Confederate state since 1876.