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Roy Cooper Holds Thin Lead Over Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina

Roy Cooper, ahead by just under 5,000 votes, declared victory early Wednesday in his race to unseat Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.Credit...Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

RALEIGH, N.C. — Roy Cooper, a Democrat, held a razor-thin lead on Thursday in North Carolina’s bitterly contested race for governor. If it holds, it would be a rare bright spot for his party this week, one that has much to do with Mr. Cooper’s call for repealing a state law limiting transgender bathroom access that has subjected North Carolina to a gale of international criticism, boycotts and cancellations.

Yet many here are now predicting that the contentious law, which catalyzed a national debate over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, is unlikely to be repealed even if Mr. Cooper becomes governor.

On Thursday, State Representative Rodney W. Moore was one of a number of Democratic lawmakers who predicted that Republicans here in the capitol would have little reason to dump the law, commonly known as House Bill 2, or H.B. 2, even if Mr. Cooper were elected.

Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican seeking his second term, has refused to concede until thousands of mail-in and provisional ballots are counted by elections boards in each of the state’s 100 counties. That process is set to conclude on Nov. 18. Mr. McCrory was widely criticized for having signed the law.

Mr. Moore noted that Donald J. Trump, the Republican president-elect, won North Carolina by nearly four percentage points in Tuesday’s election. Senator Richard M. Burr, a Republican, cruised to re-election by an even greater margin, in a race against a Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross, that had been billed as one of the nation’s closest. And Republican legislators on Tuesday maintained their supermajorities in the State House and Senate.

“They’re going to feel empowered that their agenda is working, so it’s going to be very hard to imagine them taking up H.B. 2 to overturn it or modify it,” Mr. Moore said of Republicans on Thursday. “I don’t see them chomping at the bit or singing kumbaya to change it.”

Republican leaders of the state legislature could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, declared victory early Wednesday morning, when tallies from the state’s 2,704 precincts showed him leading by just less than 5,000 votes.

For now, the only thing certain about the outcome is that lawyers from both sides will be closely monitoring the county boards as they determine which of the more than 50,000 provisional ballots should be deemed legitimate.

Mr. McCrory’s campaign announced on Wednesday that it was establishing a legal-defense fund in preparation for an “ongoing legal battle” over the vote tally.

“No one knows for sure the outcome of the election, and tens of thousands of ballots remain outstanding and not yet counted,” Jason Torchinsky, the fund’s chief lawyer, said in a statement.

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Mr. McCrory, with his wife, Ann, has refused to concede until all write-in and provisional ballots are counted.Credit...Jonathan Drake/Reuters

Chris LaCivita, the McCrory campaign’s strategist, said in a separate statement that the campaign also had “grave concerns over potential irregularities” regarding 90,000 votes in Durham County.

Still, a number of political observers here said that Mr. Cooper had the better chance of winning. Mail-in absentee voters traditionally tend to be Republicans, while voters who file provisional ballots tend to be Democrats. And though the exact number of mail-in ballots was not yet known, they were expected to be outnumbered by provisional ballots.

“I would not be surprised that Cooper keeps the lead, or has some extra cushion built into it” at the conclusion of the vote-counting process, said J. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. If either man is trailing by fewer than 10,000 votes after Nov. 18, he may demand a recount.

Whether Mr. Cooper wins or not, his showing was exceptional, given the shellacking other Democrats received on Tuesday, both in North Carolina and nationally. The outcry over H.B. 2 was widely considered to be one of the main reasons for his success.

The law, signed by Mr. McCrory in March, prohibits local governments from passing protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and it requires that people in government buildings use the restrooms that correspond with their gender at birth.

Mr. McCrory has argued that the law was necessary to ensure privacy, and others said it would protect innocent people from sexual predators. Gay rights advocates saw the bathroom provision as an attack on transgender people.

As part of the backlash against the law, planned job expansions, concerts and major sporting events have been canceled. During the campaign, Mr. Cooper argued that Mr. McCrory had harmed the state’s reputation and economy by signing the bill.

It was a message that was embraced even by some Trump supporters, and it was a likely reason Mr. Cooper and Mr. Trump found success in some of the same parts of North Carolina.

One was coastal New Hanover County, home to the city of Wilmington. The area has seen a dip in its once-flourishing film industry recently, a likely result of the legislature’s decision not to renew a state tax credit for film, television and commercial production.

But there is also a suspicion in Wilmington that Hollywood has grown leery of North Carolina because of H.B. 2. Jason Rosin, a business agent with Local 491 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union representing film workers in Wilmington, said that some of his members were motivated to vote for Mr. Cooper out of concerns about H.B. 2’s effect on the industry — even as they voted for Mr. Trump.

“I believe that in the Cooper race, they voted for their economic self-interest,” Mr. Rosin said.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 12, 2016

Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about the governor’s race in North Carolina misidentified, in some editions, the candidate that some members of the film workers’ union in Wilmington supported out of concerns for the industry. They backed the Democratic candidate for governor, Roy Cooper — not the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, a Republican.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Democrat Leads in North Carolina Governor’s Race. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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