However, unlike the Deep South, the Republican Party had sufficient historic Unionist white support from the mountains and northwestern Piedmont to gain a stable one-third of the statewide vote total in most general elections[1] A rapid move following disenfranchisement to a completely “lily-white” state GOP also helped maintain Republican support amongst the state’s voters.

[4] In that election North Carolina would, alongside Kentucky, see the largest mobilisation of female voters in the entire country.

[7] During the prolonged Democratic Party primaries, North Carolina shifted its delegates between William Gibbs McAdoo, Virginian Carter Glass, and Alabamian Oscar W. Underwood, except for a few votes for favorite son George Gordon Battle.

Ultimately neither McAdoo nor New York Governor Al Smith – who represented the immigrant, anti-Prohibition wing of the party – could prove acceptable to all Democratic delegates and the nomination went to a compromise candidate in Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis of West Virginia.

Although West Virginia was a border state whose limited African-American population had not been disenfranchised,[8] Davis did share the extreme social conservatism of Southern Democrats of his era; he supported poll taxes and opposed women's suffrage.