Foxx with wife Samara Ryder Foxx and their children, Hillary and Zachary

With all the attention on the GOP wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races yesterday, the purportedly liberal media is ignoring the fact that voters in a larger, one-time solidly red state went a little bluer yesterday.

The state’s largest city elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in 22 years, and despite the fact that this southern city is two-thirds white, the new mayor happens to be African American.

Meanwhile, this state’s most famous college town in the world of sports elected a mayor who is a Democrat and openly gay.

What state is it? More clues:

It is the 10th largest state, with a larger population than either Virginia or New Jersey. It is a Southern state that, like Virginia, flipped from red to blue in 2008, swinging from voting decisively for Republicans in every cycle since 1976 (for the kids, that’s Reagan twice, Bush I twice, Dole in 1996 and Bush II twice) to going for Obama last year. It also elected Democratic women as governor and U.S. Senator last November — and both houses of its legislature have been controlled by Democrats for the last several cycle.

Give up? It’s North Carolina, where the voters in Charlotte elected Anthony Foxx, a city councilmember for four years, as mayor.

Up the road in Chapel Hill, a Democratic stronghold best known as the home of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, Mark Kleinschmidt, an openly gay man, was also elected mayor.

So what’s the big whoop? While it’s debatable whether the GOP wins in New Jersey and Virginia are bellwethers for the congressional elections next year, the election of Mayor Foxx in Charlotte could forebode trouble for long-time GOP congresswoman, Sue Myrick, who also once served as the city’s mayor.

First elected to Congress in 1995 she was reelected handily in 2008, despite the fact that Pres. Obama won Charlotte by 25 percentage points.

Rep. Myrick comes across as dour and doctrinaire on camera, but she is not as unpleasant and hardcore as the tea bagger Rep. Virginia Foxx in NC5 — who last week said health insurance reform was a more deadly threat than terrorism. Myrick has made a name for herself as one of the most right-wing members of the House and is especially known for her unfettered expressions of bigotry against Muslims.

One slightly risky factor in Myrick’s record is that after voting against George Bush’s $700 billion bailout package last year, she voted for the Senate version. This indulgence in runaway spending — even though it may have helped save the nation from financial collapse — could potentially draw a tea bagger challenger in next year’s primaries.

She’s also Palinesque in her “drill, baby, drill,” call for ending the moratorium on oil production off the North Carolina coast, which includes the Outer Banks, a national treasure akin to the Grand Canyon, as well as an extremely vulnerable ecosystems.

But mainly demographics are working against Sue Myrick. Most of Charlotte’s explosive growth has come from emigration from Democratic strongholds — particularly the Northeast but also from California — often as a result of workers being transferred to work for Bank of America or Wachovia, both of which are headquartered in the city. (San Francisco’s Bank of America was purchased by Charlotte’s NationsBank in 1998; Wachovia was purchased by San Franciso-based Wells Fargo in December 2008.)

Just last year, NC8, a suburban, formerly reliable GOP district adjacent to Myrick’s, switched from Republican to Democratic when Larry Kissell defeated Robin Hayes, the scion of the Cannon Mills textile fortune.

But “liberal” media types shouldn’t feel bad for ignoring these significant Democratic wins in North Carolina. Being ignored while their more flamboyant and bizarre neighbors immediately to the north and south (respectively) get all the attention is ingrained into North Carolina’s history.

Back in the olden days, North Carolinians were fond of describing their state as a “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit” — the “mountains” being the aforementioned Virginia and South Carolina. Tar Heels even internalized their fate of perennially being overshadowed by the pretentiousness of others into the state’s motto: Esse quam videri — “To be rather than to seem.”

H/t: Lydia