Honest question: is North Carolina really any different than Tennessee, especially looking out over the next 10 years? From my U.S. Midwest perspective they appear to have very similar values, sentiments and politics. I'd be afraid that I'd be uprooting my family just to jump from one frying pan to another.
Take a trip and visit it. Rural is rural and it’ll be similar, I imagine. But Raleigh-Durham has a much younger and more liberal feel to it. I have never seen hipsters like NC hipsters :)
Whether this will be comfortable for you or not I can’t say. But I can tell you that it’s worth checking out.