North Carolina Primary Smorgasbord

 Last Thursday (February 12, 2026) marked the beginning of in person early voting in North Carolina. So, where do we stand and what should we watch?

NC's Partisan Stability vs. Independent Uncertainty

By Michael Bitzer

One of the interesting things I found in the generic ballot questions in last month’s Catawba-YouGov Survey was a consistency of voter intentions across the five contests asked (U.S. Senate, U.S. House, N.C. Supreme Court, N.C. State House, and N.C. State Senate).

As noted in the release, Democratic candidates generally received about 45 percent of the vote to Republicans receiving 38 percent, with less than 15 percent undecided.

But when looking at the partisan identification, we see some distinctiveness when it comes to voter intention. Take for example the U.S. Senate generic ballot contest (broken into “definitely/likely voting for Democratic candidate vs. undecided vs. definitely/likely voting for Republican candidate”1): we see clear partisan loyalty among those who self-identify as Democratic and Republican, while those who said they were ‘independent’ are more divided, but lean towards one party.

Catawba-YouGov January 2026 Survey of 1,000 (weighted) North Carolinians: Vote for U.S. Senate in November based on “Democratic Candidate” versus “Republican Candidate” based on Initial Partisan Identification, with margins of error bars for overall and subgroups shown (overall MOE +/- 3.69%).