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:

About Last Night: A Quick Look Back at the NC-11 Republican 2nd Primary

By Chris Cooper

Let me get the confession out of the way at the beginning: I didn’t see it coming either. I assumed the race would be close. I thought Cawthorn might pull it out, but I never imagined that he would garner almost twice as many votes as Bennett. Nor did I predict that he would win Haywood County—Bennett’s home county and her geographic base. In the end, Cawthorn won every county except Rutherford—a county that sits only partly in the 11^th Congressional District. In the words of Barack Obama, it was a “shellacking;” George W. Bush might have called it a “thumping.”

I’ll also admit that the types of deep data-dives that fit with the mission of this blog may seem more interesting when races are close—after all, there’s not much need to pour over the box score from the fifth inning when one team ends the game with twice as many runs as the other. Nonetheless, it is a long season, so it’s important to step back and see what the data tell us about what happened last night, and what this might tell us about the state of politics in North Carolina moving forward. 

Assessing The Early Vote in the NC-11 2nd Primary

By Chris Cooper

Early voting has concluded for the 2^nd primary in North Carolina’s 11^th Congressional District. Although mail-in ballots will continue to be counted and accepted through election day, this seems like a good time to stop and take stock of the “early” vote in the 11^th (defined for this piece as all votes accepted through the last day of in-person early voting). In addition to additional mail-in votes, there will almost certainly be some slight adjustment to the overall numbers in the coming days.

Other than a brief reminder of the candidates (Madison Cawthorn and Lynda Bennett) and their home counties (Henderson and Haywood, respectively), I’ll leave a detailed description of the players and the circumstances out of this one. If you want to catch-up, I’ve included some more description in my first post for Old North State (along with links to coverage from local and national journalists). I also wrote an entry for the London School of Economics American Politics blog that summarizes many of the players and events and an article in yesterday's Asheville Citizen Times that describes why this election is so important. Since those pieces posted, Chris Cioffi had a helpful article in Roll Call and Kyle Perrotti of the Waynesville Mountaineer and Gary Robertson of the AP posted good preview articles.

On to what we know thus far:

Final Numbers in the NC 9th Congressional District's Early Voting Period

While there will be some additional absentee by mail ballots coming in this week, the early ballots in North Carolina's Ninth Congressional District primary is complete. Now, we await the final election numbers to come in on Election Day, this Tuesday, May 14. Below is some final analysis of early accepted ballots, along with some voter history and potential voter turnout considerations.

The overwhelming number of accepted early/"absentee" ballots are from those who cast them in-person, known in North Carolina as "absentee one-stop" ballots:

North Carolina's 9th Congressional District: Early Voting Nears The End

With early voting coming to an end today (on Friday, May 10), the early voting electorate is pretty much set for the North Carolina Ninth Congressional District. All that is left are the ballots to be cast at next Tuesday's Election Day, on May 14.

So far, within the GOP primary, 8,246 ballots have been requested, by both mail-in and in-person, with slightly under 8,000 votes (7,916) accepted as ballots for counting.

In terms of accepted early ballots (from both mail-in and in-person voting), Mecklenburg County continues to dominate the ballot pool, with half of all the early accepted ballots:

On the Trump Phenomenon

David Whisenant of WBTV News interviewed me about my thoughts on the Trump phenomenon and how I became interested in politics and a resource for the media.