Deberry’s win in Durham was perhaps the most interesting victory of the four. Deberry, executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition, has no experience as a prosecutor, though she worked as a criminal-defense attorney earlier in her career. Deberry associated herself with Krasner—perhaps overly, as she was found to have cribbed heavily from Krasner’s website in the composition of her own. She won nearly 49 percent of the vote.

Deberry campaigned on reducing jail populations, in part by eliminating cash bail, becoming more selective about prosecuting certain crimes, and working to eliminate racially disparate arrests and enforcement.

Echols was seeking a second term. He had brought stability to the district attorney’s office after a string of disastrous prosecutors—most infamously Mike Nifong, who oversaw the Duke lacrosse case. Echols may have been hurt in part by his handling of prosecutions of protestors who tore down a Confederate monument in downtown Durham in August 2017. The DA’s office declined to pursue the most serious charges sought by the sheriff, but still brought the cases to trial. But after a single day’s trial, three defendants were acquitted in humiliating fashion for the district attorney’s office, and Echols pulled the plug. His attempt to split the difference alienated citizens on both sides.

The Confederate monument may have proven the coup de grace for Andrews, the Durham sheriff, too. He pursued the case aggressively, and asked for felony charges, but according to Echols didn’t gather sufficient evidence. But Andrews had plenty of other weaknesses with the increasingly progressive voters in Durham. His handling of county jails was the subject of widespread criticism, including cutting off face-to-face visits in favor of so-called video visitation. In March 2017, a 17-year-old killed herself in a county-jail cell, and state investigators concluded that deputies had failed to check on her regularly and had disregarded warnings that she might try to harm herself. She was one of several recent jail deaths.

Andrews, though a Democrat, also maintained what critics called a “friendly” relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, voluntarily honoring “detainers,” in which ICE asks jails to hold inmates who are unauthorized immigrants for 48 hours. Cooperation is voluntary. Andrews made clear he would continue the practice. Birkhead said he would not. Andrews’s campaign Facebook page also cheered a racist Facebook post in the closing days of the campaign, though the sheriff himself disavowed it.

The sheriff’s race is a microcosm of several important currents in North Carolina and nationwide: racial divides and urban-rural divides, which are often intertwined. Andrews is white, and Birkhead, the former chief of police for nearby Hillsborough and at Duke University, is black. Birkhead dominated in the city of Durham, with its significant black and Hispanic populations, while Andrews won the rural, whiter precincts in the northern part of the county.