Who Showed Up in May's Primary Election?

By Michael Bitzer

With the data finalized from the 100 counties and available via the NC State Board of Elections, we can now parse through who showed up to vote based on a number of factors. As reported in the Raleigh News and Observer recently, May's primary electorate had only two out of ten NC registered voters participate. But with the counties reporting their voter history data to the NC State Board of Elections and using the May 21 voter registration data file, we can see who showed up for May's primary. This blog post will look a variety of factors, specifically highlighting more detailed information based voter party registration, generational dynamics, and the location and type of precincts voters casting May primary ballots came from. 

Slightly over 1.4 million registered NC voters cast a May 2022 ballot, amounting to almost 20 percent registered voter turnout. That's the highest turnout in twenty years, as my colleague Chris Cooper noted in a previous blog post and chart:

NC's Democratic Primary Early Voters: Diversification in Many Ways

by Michael Bitzer

With Saturday's final day of early voting, it's time to take a deep dive into the data to see who showed up to cast absentee ballots before the "Super Tuesday" March 3rd primary election in the Old North State.

North Carolinians have three main options in casting ballots: absentee by mail, absentee onestop (which is no-excuse early voting in-person), and Election Day voting (including transfers and provisional ballots).

In this year's preliminary total, close to 800,000 ballots were cast in all party primaries through February 29 (over 500,000 of those ballots are in the Democratic primary), and while there will be some "settling" by counties and remaining processing, the following descriptive analysis should give us a sense of who showed up. We'll have to wait until Tuesday (March 3) night, shortly after the polls close at 7:30 PM, to get a sense as to how these early voters decided.