North Carolina does not have a state rock song.

Sure, you're thinking, who does? As it turns out: Washington, Oklahoma and Ohio.

When Dome was a teen-ager, a local comedy sketch show staged a campaign to have the incomparable "Louie, Louie" declared the state song.

Legislators were loath to jettison the existing tune, so they named the Kingsmen's one-off hit the state rock song instead.

Recently, a group in Oklahoma held an online contest to determine that state's rock song.

The winning song — "Do You Realize??" — was referred to the legislature, though there were a few hiccups when a member of The Flaming Lips wore a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle.

Ohio also named "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys.

So, North Carolina, what would be your official state rock song?

Post your comments in the thread below or e-mail dome@newsobserver.com.

Since 1990, the most competitive Senate races in the country have been in North Carolina.

An analysis by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota found that the last seven races here were decided by an average of six percentage points — the lowest in the nation.

The next closest states were Minnesota (6.4), New Jersey (7.5) and Missouri (8.4). Every other state had more than a 10 percent average margin.

The national average of the 344 Senate races was 22.8 percentage points. Nationally, less than a third were decided by less than 10 points, while all of North Carolina's races were below that cutoff. 

The least competitive state was North Dakota, which had no competitive races during that period of time. 

The closest win in North Carolina was Lauch Faircloth's in 1992, which was decided by four points. The biggest win was Elizabeth Dole's in 2002, when the margin was 8.6 points.

(That was closely followed by Kay Hagan's 8.5 point defeat of her in 2008.)

As a Dome tipster points out, the races prior to 1990 were not much less competitive, either.

A Florida professor has weighed in on the definition of the South.

In a piece in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday, English professor Diane Roberts quotes Chris Kromm, director of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, on the litany of reasons people give for removing North Carolina from the South:

"Every time a Southern state starts voting for Democrats, people say, 'Oh, that's not the real South,' " says Kromm. When Barack Obama won North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, some "wanted to magically declare them somehow un-Southern."

The "Southern" parts of the South seem to be shrinking, at least to those who define "Southern" as white right-wingers who say "y'all." ...

North Carolina isn't Southern because it's attracting Midwestern retirees, Latinos and tech types. Plus, there's the Research Triangle, the constellation of great universities, labs and libraries so despised by Sen. Jesse Helms. Real Southerners don't cotton to book learning.

Roberts argues that North Carolina, Virginia and Florida are not aberrations, but the beginning of the "New South we've been promising ourselves since 1865."

Previously: Whistling Past North Carolina, parts 1, 2 and 3

Lots can be learned from the Center for Responsive Politics' new report on Congress' newest members.

The Washington-based non-profit website offers online campaign databases about every member of Congress, breaking down donations and expenditures and ferreting out details about industry and lobbyist support, Barb Barrett reports.

The group released data today on North Carolina's newest senator, Kay Hagan, who was sworn in Tuesday.

Among the tidbits:

* The website ActBlue was Hagan's top donor. Donations linked to the Democratic website amounted to $1.2 million among Hagan's itemized donations.

* Nearly 40 percent of Hagan's financial support came from out of state. Two states rang up more than $500,000 for her: North Carolina and California. Within North Carolina, her top geographical support came from the Triad — not surprising since Hagan is from Greensboro.

* Hagan received $10,000 each from political action committees representing such groups as steelworkers, airline pilots, teachers, firefighters and Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu, Tom Carper, Patrick Leahy and Richard Durbin.

Details on Hagan (and all the other new House and Senate members) are available here.

Thomas Schaller says North Carolina is not yet really blue.

The author of "Whistling Past Dixie" tells Dome that he thinks Barack Obama's impressive ground game and the "atmospherics" of this election had more to do with his win here, a state he had urged the Democrat to ignore.

"It may stay for Obama again next cycle, but I don't think it's tipped permanently," he said. "Almost every advantage was for the Democrats, and it was still a very close win. If I were a North Carolina Democrat, I wouldn't rejoice too soon."

Schaller said Obama could win the "New South" — an area he defined as influenced by high-tech jobs in places such as the Research Triangle Park and high rates of non-native Southerners moving here. He said Obama's coalition was Northern transplants and black voters. 

"This wasn't a Nascar victory," he said. "It was a decidedly New South victory." 

Not surprisingly, Thomas Schaller was surprised he was wrong.

The author of "Whistling Past Dixie" wrote on Salon Monday that he was "somewhat surprised" that Barack Obama won North Carolina, a state he had earlier urged the Democrat to ignore. 

"It's clear that the 'new South' is arriving faster than I anticipated, or perhaps more accurately, that Obama was able to deliver it faster," he writes. 

He also noted that the three Southern states Obama won were among those with the highest median incomes for the region, except for Georgia. He also notes that the 22 counties where Obama did less well than John Kerry were in the rural and Appalachian South.

"It was a 'new South' victory won on the backs of votes cast by a lot of non-native Southern transplants," he writes. "It was not a rural Southern victory."

Next, we talk to Schaller directly. 

Ferrel Guillory says the "Seaboard South" is different.

The head of the Program on Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill says that Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida have moved away from the rest of the South in recent years.

He said the increased focus on high-tech jobs in Research Triangle Park and banking in Charlotte as well as the strengthening of the state's university system has led to a demographic shift that made the state more open to Democrat Barack Obama.

"Economically and demographically, the South has split in two," he said. "The 'Seaboard South' states — with the exception of South Carolina — have been growing robustly. They have moved more speedily into the newer economy and their metropolitan areas are burgeoning."

He said Obama found a pool of "persuadable voters" in the metro suburbs of North Carolina.

"Obama campaigned on a theme of change, but it was the change that was already here that put him over the top," he said.

Guillory made a similar argument in the biannual "State of the South" report in 2007.

A professor of Southern studies says North Carolina did not change overnight.

Ted Ownby of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi says that Tar Heels have long been more liberal than other Southerners.

"Despite Jesse Helms' popularity, there's always been a pretty strong range of liberal and progressive elements in North Carolina politics," he said, citing Terry Sanford, among others. "Since the 1930s, North Carolina's liberal politicians have tended to be to the left of other liberal politicians in the South, though sometimes they have to moderate their liberal tendencies."

Ownby said that tradition belies recent attempts to credit Barack Obama's win here and in Virginia mainly to an influx of liberal Northeasterners.

He argued that while that was a factor, so was the state's existing political climate, dissatisfaction with President Bush's policies, a significant black population and intensive courting by the Obama campaign and local Democrats.

"It would be shortchanging those efforts to talk about the win entirely in terms of newcomers," he said.

Has North Carolina seceded from the Confederacy?

The aftermath of last week's historic presidential election has led many national commentators to speculate that North Carolina and Virginia are no longer part of "the South."

The latest example comes from the New York Times today, which not-so subtly credits all those former New Yorkers moving to places like Cary for Barack Obama's wins here.

Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the "suburban South," notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee. 

A similar urge to separate Tar Heels from their Confederate brethren has long been at work in the move to redefine the South Atlantic states (give or take a few neighbors) as "the Southeast."

Dome has always thought of the region as "the Shallow South" — the opposite end of the pool from the Deep South.

Color your map blue. Barack Obama has won North Carolina's 15 electoral votes, at least according to the Associated Press.

The AP called the race today, leaving only Missouri gray on its red-and-blue map.

Of course, it's not really official until the State Board of Elections says so. The election will be certified in a few weeks after about 40,000 provisional ballots have been sorted through. For now, officially, Obama is ahead by some 13,000 votes.

But Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, said provisional ballots hardly ever change the outcome. Elections officials expect 65 percent of those ballots to eventually count.

"We were getting calls from the news media asking when we were going to call it, which I thought was funny," she said. "We've never done that."

News organizations call elections, she points out, but when a race is close by a razor thin margin, they hesitate to go out on a limb. State elections officials certify totals, which always takes time.

So you'll have to wait until Nov. 25 to get your final, final total.

But take comfort in this: North Carolina has apparently picked the winner. Meanwhile, the Show-Me state has John McCain leading by 5,800 votes with provisional ballots still to be counted.