1956 United States presidential election in North Carolina

The 1956 United States presidential election in North Carolina took place on November 6, 1956, as part of the 1956 United States presidential election. North Carolina voters chose 14 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

As a former Confederate state, North Carolina had a history of Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement of its African-American population and dominance of the Democratic Party in state politics. However, unlike the Deep South, the Republican Party had sufficient historic Unionist white support from the mountains and northwestern Piedmont to gain one-third of the statewide vote total in most general elections, where turnout was higher than elsewhere in the former Confederacy due substantially to the state's early abolition of the poll tax in 1920. Like Virginia, Tennessee and Oklahoma, the relative strength of Republican opposition meant that North Carolina never had statewide white primaries, although certain counties did use a white primary until it was banned by Smith v. Allwright.

Following the banning of white primaries by the Supreme Court, North Carolina in 1948 offered less support to the Dixiecrat bolt than any other former Confederate state, due to the economic liberalism of its Black Belt and solid Democratic party discipline due to consistent Republican opposition. Although there was little satisfaction with Harry S. Truman during his second term, the loyalty of the white voters of the state’s Black Belt and the previously anti-Al Smith Outer Banks meant that unlike Texas, Florida and Virginia, urban middle-class Republican voting was inadequate to carry North Carolina for Eisenhower.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the proportion of blacks registered to vote in the state increased steadily from less than ten percent to around twenty percent by the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Several Piedmont cities had blacks on their councils, although blacks in rural areas generally remained without hope of registering. The state would largely escape the overt “Massive Resistance” seen in neighbouring Virginia, and four of its congressmen did not sign the Southern Manifesto. Nonetheless, although the Greensboro school board voted 6–1 to desegregate within a day of Brown, no serious desegregation would take place until well into the 1960s, while two non-signers would be challenged and defeated in 1956 primaries.

Analysis
North Carolina was carried by Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, with 50.66 percent of the popular vote, over incumbent Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 49.34 percent. As in 1952, the key to Stevenson’s victory was the powerful loyalty of Black Belt and Outer Banks white voters. The east–west partisan split seen in 1928 and 1952 became so consistent that Stevenson won only four counties in the western bloc — with Eisenhower’s gain vis-à-vis 1952 of around 6 points concentrated in traditionally Democratic mountain and Piedmont counties — but in the coastal plain Eisenhower won only Dare and Brunswick Counties. Critical help for Stevenson also came from gaining a much larger proportion of the growing urban black electorate than elsewhere in the Confederacy.

Alleghany County voted Republican for the first time ever, whilst Dare County voted Republican for the first time since 1896, and McDowell County for the first time since 1908. This was the last time until 1992 that North Carolina would vote for the losing candidate in a presidential election, and remains the last time that a Republican has won the presidency without carrying the state.