Except the urban areas cannot make laws they want to improve conditions - the legislators from rural areas work together to override municipal specific laws in the state legislature and further enshrine the rural hold on the legislature by making the gerrymandering better for rural areas and they are working now to stack the state supreme court. A Democrat won the governship last time round and the GOP response was to remove powers from the executive branch before the governor took office. So even if a minority percentage of the people live in rural areas, they have an outsize effect on the running of certain people's day to day lives in North Carolina.