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,[3] where turnout was higher than elsewhere in the former Confederacy due substantially to the state's early abolition of the poll tax in 1920.

[6] However, anti-Catholicism against 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith in the fishing communities of the Outer Banks, alongside increasing middle-class Republican voting in such cities as Charlotte, Durham and Greensboro,[7] meant that Republican nominee Herbert Hoover would use the lily-white state party to win its electoral votes for the first time since the Reconstruction election of 1872.

During Hoover's administration, North Carolina was the scene of a major controversy in the Supreme Court nomination of Fourth Circuit judge and 1920 Republican gubernatorial candidate John Johnston Parker.

[11] it had extremely severe effects in the South, which had the highest unemployment rate in the nation, and many Southerners blamed this on the North and on Wall Street, rejecting Hoover's claim that the Depression's causes were exogenous.

[11] Neither Hoover nor Democratic nominees Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Speaker John Nance Garner campaigned in North Carolina, which was universally expected to return to the “Solid South” with economic conditions as bad as they were.