Trump won NC by a much wider margin and so did Senator Burr, both Republicans.
Why did McCrory lose by a narrow margin?
If I had been in NC I would have voted Trump but not McCrory.
The governor got into the transgender bathroom issue earlier this year almost on the heels of Georgia’s Governor vetoing a First Amendment religious freedom law and Donald Trump winning the NC primary.
Governor McCrory is an Establishment Republican and I perceived his move and the GOP controlled legislature’s move on trangender bathrooms as an attempt to get back into the ‘good graces’ of conservative religious voters who were defecting to the ‘outsider’ Trump.
In 2015 Governor McCrory vetoed First Amendment religious freedom legislation to protect government officials with religious convictions from having to participate in gay marriage.
The GOPe of NC took on Charlotte on its ordinance knowing public opinion was on their side (did they “focus group” it) and I sense to help McCrory after he looked bad on gay marriage by not supporting the religious freedom legislation the year before.
You say that because you do not live in NC. McCrory has been harassed by the NAACP for the last four years. They went so far as to put toilets in front of the Governor's Mansion and to hold weekly "Moral Monday" sit-ins in the Capitol Building. The so-called "bathroom bill" was a set-up by the Human Right's Campaign and the lesbian mayor of Charlotte. (BTW, McCrory is the former mayor of Charlotte.) They knew that the legislature would respond because a City Council cannot make laws that affect the entire state. The legislature went too far in some of what they included in the bill, but McCrory signed it anyway.
Roy Cooper, who now has a slim lead of less than 5000 votes, has been running for governor instead of doing his job for the past 13 years. The attorney general is supposed to represent the duly enacted laws of the state whether they personally agree with them or not and HB2 is only one of several laws he refused to defend in court. In NC, the attorney general's position has traditionally been used by the Democrats as a stepping-stone to the office of Governor and Roy Cooper is tired of waiting for "his turn".
A strong supporter of Donald Trump, McCrory did not even campaign for the last three weeks of October because he was dealing with the real problem of the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew. He was criticized by the NAACP and Cooper for using surplus tax revenue to replenish the "rainy day fund" that the Democrats were always dipping into when they were in power. Had he not done so, the state would not have had the funds to cope with the massive flooding caused by Matthew. He and the Republican-led legislature enacted other fiscal policies that has given NC one of the healthiest economies in the Southeast. If ever a governor deserved re-election based on his performance, McCrory does and the fact that the Dems planned to "steal" the election from him is disgusting to me and I hope it backfires on them!