By Michael Bitzer
With North Carolina's counties and state board of elections finalizing the results of the 2022 mid-term elections, and the subsequent completion of voter history data on the 3.7 million North Carolinians who cast a ballot this past November, we can now get an official portrait of the state's electorate and who showed up.
And based on this information, a reevaluation of the performance of one political party in 2022 is warranted. More on that later.
As a reminder: the voter history data file compiles each voter's casting of a ballot for an election, along with the party they were registered with and the method that the voter utilized to cast a ballot. Once you combine this data with the voter registration data file (I used the December 3, 2022 voter registration file), you can merge the voter history information with the registration data and analyze the electorate based on official records.
This post will focus on the turnout rates for various voter demographics, along with comparing the electorates to the voter pool; future posts will analyze other dynamics that the data tells us, especially for past voting trends and vote methods.