By Michael Bitzer
With four in ten of the 7.8 million North Carolina registered voters having selected ‘unaffiliated’ in their party registration, pundits continue to describe these voters as ‘political independents’—with the idea that they are up for grabs between the two major parties (which themselves are at 30 percent each).
A recent podcast that explores the political U.S. South highlighted whether North Carolina was ready to ‘flip to the Democrats’ with this year’s U.S. Senate election—with Mitch Landrieu observing that the state’s unaffiliated voters are “otherwise known as independents—in the middle…”
And one of the state’s leading partisan strategist—Democrat Morgan Jackson—noted that unaffiliateds “don’t want to affiliate with either political party,” while Republican strategist Paul Shumaker observed that the unaffiliated voters are concerned about what impacts them directly in deciding their vote—and by extension, are not partisan loyalists.
Being registered unaffiliated tells us how someone is registered. It does not, by itself, tell us how that person thinks, votes or identifies politically.
So are these unaffiliated voters really independents and therefore up for grabs in North Carolina? The answer, at least from the evidence presented here, is not necessarily—and perhaps not even in the same way from Manteo to Murphy.
