North Carolina's "Blue Moon" Election Cycle and Its Congressional Contests

With North Carolina entering its "blue moon" mid-term election cycle (meaning that, with the exception of a few judicial contests, no major state-wide race (for example, a U.S. Senate or gubernatorial contest) will be on the ballot this year in the Old North State), so the focus for Tar Heel political observers will generally be on the legislative districts, both congressional and state house and senate. For this analysis, I'll be focusing on the thirteen congressional districts in the state and their dynamics internally when it comes to voter registration at the beginning of 2018.

First, some general context for whenever we talk about mid-term elections and what we know from the past; and yes, I understand, very acutely, that some of the "rules" that we (political scientists and historians) know from the past have been either "bent" or "broken" when it comes to this current political environment. However, since we don't have anything else to rely upon when it comes to investigating and trying to understand this environment until the actual election, we need to stick with some of the basic principles that have shaped our politics, especially when focusing on mid-term elections.

Interesting comparisons between voting methods in 2010 and 2014

In looking deeper into the mail-in ballots requests so far this year, one of the questions that has been surrounding this data is, "how did the voters, who are requesting mail-in ballots this year, cast their ballots in 2010's election?"  With the new voting laws (currently under legal challenge) having shortened the in-person absentee voting (in terms of days, but not hours), would the likelihood be that some voters who used in-person absentee voting or even waiting until Election Day to cast their ballots utilize mail-in absentee balloting this year?

Among the 16,849 requested ballots so far this year, I was able to merge that data with the 2010 voter history data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections and connect this year's voters' records with their 2010 voting records.

From these data, we're seeing a shift by voters to utilizing mail-in absentee balloting: four years ago, 60 percent of this year's voters (who are voting by mail) were either in-person absentee voters, in-person on Election Day, or some other method of casting their ballots.

For each of the registered party affiliation, here are the breakdowns:

For registered Democrats:

For registered Republicans:

For registered unaffiliated voters:

One other interesting trend: I compared the voters' registration to a party in 2010 to what their party registration is in 2014.

While registered Democrats saw 86 voters change their registration from being Democrat in 2010 to something else in 2014 (30 switched to GOP and 56 to unaffiliated) and registered Republicans saw 216 change from being GOP in 2010 to something else in 2014 (145 switched to Democratic registration and 71 to unaffiliated), it was unaffiliated voters who saw the biggest number of 'defections' from their ranks: 341, with 197 going to register Democratic and 144 to registered Republican.