Wednesday, July 8, 2020

ONSP's first "vlog" on the South and the 2020 Election

So, we decided to try something out: a 'vlog', or a video version of a blog post. Since the four of us study American politics, we also look at things through a Southern point of view at times, and an article on "Democrats, Biden look to accelerate Southern political shift," by Bill Barrow of the AP this week caught our attention. 

Here are some thoughts as to how each of us see the role of the South in the 2020 election, as well as thinking about the political dynamics through race, generations, and what the region may be like come this fall. We'll try to do an occasion "vlog" as we have time and there's an interesting story to further explain. 



Enjoy! 

Monday, July 6, 2020

North Carolina's "None" Voters: The Growing Non-Reporting of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

By Chris Cooper and Michael Bitzer

The Increasing Relevance of a Footnote


Both of us spend a lot of time with the North Carolina voter registration and voter history files. When we present data, evidence, and analyses from these files, we usually provide a small footnote that indicates something like “*we exclude a small number of voters for which demographic data are not available” or acknowledge that a portion of voters don’t report their classification. Over the past few months, however, we both have begun to question how small of a number these "no label" voters really represents. In the course of investigating it, we have discovered that, while still relatively small, the number of folks who do not answer the demographic questions when they register to vote is increasing. As we discuss below, this presents some problems that many of us must grapple with when doing similar analyses in the future.