If President Donald Trump’s lead in North Carolina holds, the state will — yet again — have voted for a Republican for president and a Democrat for governor in the same year.

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, easily won his re-election bid on Tuesday even as GOP presidential nominee Trump appears poised to claim North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes.

It’s just the latest example of what some have called North Carolina’s split personality when it comes to politics.

Many voters in the state have traditionally “wanted a governor who gets things done,” said Gary Pearce, who served for years as a key adviser to N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt. “But they have looked for something different in a president.”

He imagined Cooper-Trump voters this year telling themselves, “Boy, I like the job Cooper is doing on COVID. But we need to shake up those people in Washington, so I’m going to vote for Donald Trump.”

And yet, with the state’s voters more divided than ever before — rural vs. urban, college-educated vs. non-college educated, men vs. women — such ticket-splitters are becoming “few and far between” in North Carolina.

Even though Cooper and Trump both received more than 2.7 million votes this year, only four of North Carolina’s 100 counties went for both of them: Granville, Scotland, Lenoir and Martin. Mostly, Cooper scored big margins in urban and predominantly Black counties, while Trump dominated in rural and outer suburban counties.

Focusing on getting things done, not ideology

Since 1968, when Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” ushered in decades of dominance by GOP presidential candidates in North Carolina, the state has voted nine times to put a Democrat in the governor’s mansion and a Republican in the White House on the same Election Day.

This year would be No. 10.

Democrat Jim Hunt, who was known as the “education governor,” was elected N.C. governor four times between 1976 and 1996. During three of those four elections, the state also voted for Republicans — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole — for president.

Mike Easley, another Democrat, was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004 — the same years Republican George W. Bush was the choice of N.C. voters.

Ferrel Guillory, a former political columnist at the News & Observer in Raleigh, said N.C. Democrats responded to the rise of the Republican Party in the South by putting forward center-left candidates for governor whose popular can-do agendas focused on diversifying the economy, building up education and other “unglamorous elements of state government.”

N.C. voters “sent the ideologues and the colorful characters —Jesse Helms, Sam Ervin — to Washington,” said Guillory, now a professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism school. “North Carolinians liked their governors to put on a blue suit and red tie, then keep the schools running and the highways paved.”

And though they appealed to the African-American voters who became part of the Democrats’ coalition, these governors never went as far left as the national Democratic Party.

“And if you look at the recent Democratic governors,” Pearce said, “Jim Hunt was sort of the model. They grew up in the country, working on a farm, with an innate conservatism and religious faith. Then they made a transition, to be urban progressives.”

Cooper is in the same mold. Like his predecessors, the Nashville, N.C.-native, is not flashy and focuses on the task at hand — during his term, handling the COVID-19 pandemic. His science-based restrictions even prompted a highly publicized fight with President Trump over his plans to hold a full-blown national political convention in Charlotte.