Democrats got a big head start with voting in NC, but Republicans are catching up
When the polls opened for early voting on Oct. 15, more than half a million North Carolinians had already cast their ballots by mail, and a majority of them were registered Democrats.
But since the polls have opened, Republicans have narrowed the gap. Registered Republicans accounted for just 18% of votes cast on Oct. 15; as of Wednesday, that portion had climbed to nearly 31%, in line with the percentage of North Carolina voters who are registered Republicans.
“Over the course of the in-person voting period, we’ve seen the proportions look more like the overall electorate,” says Tomas Lopez, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, a nonpartisan group that works to increase voter turnout. “So you certainly are seeing less of that kind of a partisan skew as time goes on.”
Registered Democrats have cast 1.4 million votes, compared to 1.1 million by Republicans and nearly 1.1 million by unaffiliated voters. Democrats are historically more likely to turn out for in-person early voting; Hillary Clinton received 84,074 more votes during early in-person voting than Donald Trump in 2016, even as she lost North Carolina when the Election Day vote favored Trump.
This year, Democratic candidates from Joe Biden on down have been encouraging their supporters to vote early. Which is why some Republicans are encouraged that the turnout gap isn’t larger.
Hal Weatherman, campaign manager for Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest, told supporters by email last week that Democrats traditionally run up a substantial lead during the first week of early voting, only to see it disappear on Election Day. Weatherman then cited turnout numbers for Oct. 20, which showed Republicans outvoting Democrats at the polls that day.
“The Dems’ stranglehold on the first week of early voting was broken,” Weatherman wrote. “This is a body blow of epic proportions to the Democrat Get Out the Vote effort.”
Republicans have outvoted Democrats at the polls each day since then except Sunday, for a margin of nearly 73,000 votes, according to data compiled by the State Board of Elections. But Democrats still outnumber Republicans by more than 2-to-1 among people voting by mail, which is playing an outsized role in this fall’s election because of concerns about voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic.
More than 800,000 North Carolinians have already returned their ballots by mail, more than four times the number for the entire 2016 election. About 47% of those were cast by Democrats, compared to about 33% by unaffiliated voters and 20% by Republicans.
The Democratic dominance of mail-in voting is a change from 2016. That year, when fewer than 200,000 votes came in by mail, Donald Trump edged Hillary Clinton among mail-in voters by 6,167.
This year, polls show Democrats are more likely to vote by mail because they’re more concerned about going to the polls during the pandemic. In addition, President Trump has said he thinks mail-in voting leads to fraud and cheating, signaling to Republicans that it’s better to vote in person, said Rachel Weber, spokeswoman for NextGen North Carolina, which works to mobilize young voters to support “progressive candidates.”
“President Trump has sowed confusion and stoked conspiracy theories for months now,” Weber said in an interview. “So the voters he’s talking to, his base, don’t know what to make of mail-in voting.”
Weber said despite the recent Republican advantage in early voting at the polls she’s confident Democrats will win, because of an edge among young voters. About 45% of first-time voters in North Carolina so far are 18 to 29 years old, Weber said, and polls show these young voters favor Biden over Trump.
“At the end of the day, we know this is going to be close,” she said. “North Carolina doesn’t really do landslides.”
Turnout numbers leave unanswered questions
Several factors make drawing conclusions from the early turnout numbers difficult, notes Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College and co-author of the blog Old North State Politics.
For starters, Bitzer said, there’s the large number of absentee ballots that voters have requested but haven’t yet returned. More than 1.4 million voters requested a mail-in ballot, more than six times as many as did during 2016, but only about 800,000 have been returned so far, according to the board of elections.
“The question is, we’ve got over 600,000 that are potentially still out there,” Bitzer said in an interview. “Do those start coming in, and who is sending them in?”
Another unknown is how many people will vote and whether the additional voters favor one party or candidate over another. More than 4.7 million North Carolinians voted in the presidential election in 2016, and Bitzer said early on he expected that number to grow to about 5 million this year.
“I’m starting to seriously rethink that and bump it up to 5.2, maybe to 5.4 million,” he said. “That’s an increase of half a million to 700,000 votes over 2016.”
And finally, notes Lopez of Democracy North Carolina, there’s no way to know who the state’s large number of unaffiliated voters are supporting. About a third of North Carolina’s 7.3 million registered voters are unaffiliated, more than are registered Republicans.
“Unaffiliated voters span the political spectrum, so we don’t have a great read on them,” Lopez said. “And you can be registered for one party and vote for the other, even in this current polarized environment. And I think particularly in a state like North Carolina it’s hard to say in whose favor that cuts.”
