Bitzer's Early Assessment of NC's 2024 Election

By Michael Bitzer

Yet again, North Carolina has seen another historic, but traditional, general election: in sum, Republican presidential and Democratic gubernatorial. The more time changes, the more the patterns stay the same.

But digging into a 48-hour post-analysis of the Old North State's general election (after finally getting a decent night's sleep), one finds some distinctive patterns and trends that give us a sense of what is going on this year in the electoral body politic of North Carolina.

Here's a first attempt to describe and consider some dynamics that I'm going to be very interested in diving deeper once the NC voter history data file is available (later in December after the election is certified). 

A Record 5.6M+ Ballots Cast, But Not A Record Turnout Percentage

As the electoral saying goes, it's all about turnout, turnout, turnout--and that's especially true in North Carolina's general elections. We'll have to wait and see about the partisan (and non-partisan, i.e. unaffiliated) dynamics at play and a host of other factors, but an early assessment of county-level turnout reveals some stark differences beyond the 5.6 million ballots cast (a record) that set the state turnout rate to 73 percent (two points lower than the historic high set in 2020). 

An Early Assessment of Early Voting in North Carolina

By Michael Bitzer and Christopher Cooper

Let's get the caveats out of the way early--we think that analyzing patterns in early voting data are important. They're important for telling us the method people are using to cast their votes. They're important to give us an early sense of whether we're seeing changes in the normal patterns we see. They're important (in this case) to let us understand how the devestation of Helene might (or might not) be affecting voting patterns. And they're important for reminding us how open and transparent our election system is in North Carolina.

Notice that we didn't say that they're important because they help us forecast the outcomes. That's because they're not. The problem with using these data to forecast winners and losers is that we are missing the election day vote, which will be a substantial proportion of the overall vote. Using early voting data to predict election outcomes would be like deciding that you can predict the outcome of a baseball game in the bottom of the 6th. We still have three more innings to go and anything can happen. 

With that out of the way, here are six important storylines worth highlighting after early voting.