The narrative that grew up around H.B. 2 — officially, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — turned town against country by persuading both that one’s idea of common sense is the other’s worst nightmare. It stymied the long-running efforts of activists to persuade rural whites to join a progressive interracial coalition.

The truth is that the cities and counties have plenty in common. Dwight Mullen, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville who collects statistics on the struggles of local African-Americans, told me that “what the data clearly show are that poor whites in Appalachia are the socio-economic cousins of African-Americans in the city. Replace Nascar with the N.B.A., and all of the sudden we start having very similar interests.”

This is the point that the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P., has made at rallies from the mountains to the coast, where he has interlaced hard socio-economic facts with quotes from the Psalms and Hebrew Prophets — all to weave a common story of suffering in this state. “You can feel the mood is beginning to change, that people are understanding that they’re voting against their own self-interest,” said Wanda Woodby, who helped found a new branch of the N.A.A.C.P. in the western part of the state. “But then the transgender issue popped up.”

Moreover, facts and prayers didn’t work so well in the shadow of a presidential candidate who encouraged his supporters to ignore reality and dismiss the Golden Rule as rigged. Mr. Trump turned the 2016 election into an anti-fact crusade in which laughably vague promises masqueraded as common-sense policy proposals.

He also showed a genius for manipulating the anxieties of evangelicals. “In the South, we have these traditions of reading the Bible as a story of a God who affirms our fears and fights on our side and is going to destroy our enemies in the end,” said Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a progressive Baptist activist in Durham who collaborates with Dr. Barber. “Very faithful people will say that his instrument right now is Donald Trump.”