On the special election in North Carolina's 9th Congressional district--and increased rural-urban polarization

Five Thirty Eight reports today on the Republican win, including this paragraph about the rural-urban (or, more precisely, suburban) split in the vote.  Nathaniel Rakich writes: 

The results also represent a continuation of the mini-realignment we’ve seen in the Trump era of suburbs getting bluer and rural areas moving even more toward the GOP. For instance, McCready lost the district even as he won suburban Mecklenburg County by 13 percentage points, an improvement on the 2018 results, when he won Mecklenburg by 10 points. (The portion of Mecklenburg that falls in the 9th District consists of affluent white areas of metro Charlotte.) But as noted by Ryan Matsumoto, an analyst at Inside Elections, McCready did worse than his 2018 performance in every other county, most of which are sparsely populated.