By Michael Bitzer
With 2025 concluded and the start of what will be an intense 2026, I was reviewing the past year’s Catawba College-YouGov surveys of North Carolinians (1) to see what interesting patterns or trends occurred over the year.
One thing that stood out to me (because of its potential implications for electoral volatility in a presidential-to-midterm transition year) was a fairly consistent pattern of the state’s partisan identification—that is, until the final survey of 2025.
As part of a standard set of questions asked in each Catawba-YouGov poll, respondents can initally say what their partisan identification is: Democrat, Republican, Independent, other, or not sure. Another question asks for the respondents’ ‘strength’ of their initial partisan identification, meaning for partisans ‘are you strong or not very strong’ in your identity, while among those who initially say they are ‘Independent,’ do they lean to one party or the other, or do they consider themselves a ‘pure’ independent.
Starting with the first Catawba-YouGov Survey in August 2024, the partisan self-identifications of the surveys showed a pretty consistent pattern over the past year, until the last survey.
Figure 1: Catawba-YouGov 2024-2025 Surveys with initial partisan identifications among North Carolina Respondents.
