Analysis of North Carolina State House Districts

by Michael Bitzer

With the upcoming North Carolina primary elections on March 3, and with the state legislative and congressional district maps finalized for the 2020 election, here's a look at the North Carolina House of Representatives districts for where things stand at the beginning of the year, and the possible classifications for each district come November.

My approach to classifying districts is based on their partisan behavior, meaning the categories use a combination of factors: presidential results within the district; voter registration percentages (party registration and racial demographics) from the January 11, 2020 registration file from the North Carolina State Board of Elections; and the district's 'regionalism,' namely the percentage of registered voters in center cities (urban counties), outside of the center city but still inside an urban county, a surrounding suburban county, or a rural county.

First, to give a sense of how the four regions performed as a whole in the 2016 presidential election, this chart gives the four regions and their state-wide performances:

2019 Year in Review of NC's Registered Voters

by Michael Bitzer

With the end of 2019 comes a status report of where North Carolina stands in terms of voter registration and the patterns that we have seen over the past year, based on data from the NC State Board of Elections.

With the January 5, 2019 count of registered voters (active, inactive, and temporary status) compared to the December 28 count, North Carolina's voter pool saw a net increase of 273,238 voters, or four percent, at the end of 2019. Of the state's one hundred counties, all but two saw net increases in their voter rolls: Montgomery and Yancey counties saw declines in their total voters.

As expected, the major urban counties saw their numbers increase the most: Mecklenburg (home to Charlotte) saw a net increase of 34,314; Wake (with Raleigh), a net increase of 32,703; Guilford (with Greensboro), a net increase of 11,329; and Cumberland (with Fayetteville), a net increase of 10,301.

Are NC "Suburbs" Trending Like National Suburbs?

With the analysis settling on the 2019 odd-year elections, the national narrative appears to be focused on the suburban swings against the GOP and towards the Democrats. And in the 2019 general election in North Carolina's Ninth Congressional District, the 'swing' seemed to be more dichotomous in the 'suburbs.' More on that later.

First, an assumption: it is popularly imagined about the differences between 'urban' versus 'rural' areas of our nation and state. For example, an urban county contains a densely-populated central city (Mecklenburg County with Charlotte, Wake County with Raleigh), while 'rural' designates an area beyond a metropolitan area of the urban and surrounding suburbs, typically with low population density. Those are easily envisioned in their characteristics, and even more so nowadays in their 'political behavior.'

It's when you get into the 'suburbs' that popular conceptions of that type of region come into some potential differences. In my analyses, I rely on the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's 2017's classification of metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs. These MSAs designated a central city, surrounded by counties that are connected with the central city (surrounding suburban counties). Then, whatever counties are left, are considered 'rural' (and yes, there are micropolitan statistical areas, but I leave that for future analyses).

North Carolina's Voter Trends: Regionalism in 2018's Election

As another chapter in exploring the Old North State's 2018 mid-term election data, it appears that North Carolina isn't just experiencing a tectonic shift among generational cohorts, but also within the geography of the state.

Like the rest of the nation, North Carolina is experiencing the 'urban-rural' divide in its politics, but with some clarifications as to the division. This analysis looks at the turnout rates in four 'regions' of the Old North State: at urban county voters who live within a central city (Charlotte, Raleigh, etc.), those voters who reside outside the central city but within that same urban county, voters in the surrounding suburban counties to the urban county, and then all rural votes. This page denotes which counties are in each category, based on the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's classification.

With the 2018 Election dust settling, let's revisit redistricting's influence

Now that the dust is settling on the North Carolina 2018 mid-terms (I can't speak for other states), we can begin to analyze and dig deeper into the data of voters who showed up to cast ballots, once that information is released by the counties to the NC State Board of Elections. It will likely be posted into the "voter history" data file, found here, and I'll work to slice out the 2018 voters and merge it with the voter registration file.

Yet there is some analysis beginning to show about the results of the Old North State's elections and what it might mean. One that caught my eye was over at LongLeaf Politics blog, about the issue of Democrats "winning" more votes yet not gaining a proportional representation in either the U.S. House or in the state legislature.

In Andrew Dunn's argument, Democrats

"tend to live in big cities. Rural areas are reliably red. Geographically, rural areas are simply much larger. So in most any way you draw districts, Democrats tend to pack together."

Yes, urban areas (i.e., "big cities") are trending more Democratic, and in North Carolina, urban counties are noticeably blue in elections (and some are becoming bluer with each election).

But how do we know that Democrats are "packed" together in urban areas: is it 50 percent of all Democrats are concentrated in urban areas? Are there few, if any, Democrats out in the ruby red rural counties? What about the supposed 'battleground' suburbs (which, in the Old North State's surrounding suburban counties, aren't really that competitive, as noted above)--are Democrats suburbanite voters, or are they all just big city dwellers?

April's Analysis of North Carolina Registered Voter Pool

While April 1 lands on a Sunday, the latest North Carolina State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement data, posted on Saturday, March 31, gives information about the 6.9 million registered voters in the state.

First, the state's political party registration among these voters breaks down as 38 percent registered Democrat, 31 percent registered unaffiliated, 30 percent registered Republican, 1 percent registered Libertarian, and 0.000004 percent (or, 3 voters) who have registered with the recently approved Green Party in the Old North State.

Among the five different generational cohorts, the party registration continues to demonstrate a trend among younger voters to opt to registered unaffiliated:

Analysis of North Carolina Voters by Gender

With discussions of how women may be a deciding factor in the 2018 mid-term elections, and in concluding Women's History Month, I decided to do another deep data dive, this time into the gender differences within North Carolina's registered voter pool.

My research interests in the Old North State's politics tend to focus on how North Carolina's voter pool is experiencing two "tectonic" shifts: one based on generational cohorts (those voters under the age of 37, who constitute the Millennial and Generation Z cohorts, versus those voters over the age of 37, who make up Generation X, Baby Boomer, and Silent/Greatest generations), while the other shift is the urban/suburban/rural divide in the Old North State.  This analysis uses these two characteristics to divide the active and inactive registered voters, with a focus on gender.

Deep Dive into the Demographic Dynamics of NC's Districts: Volume 3--NC's State House

With the previous posts on congressional and state senate districts, I looked at the voters within each district and utilized five categories to classify: percentage of party registration, racial and ethnicity, regionalism, generations, and gender. This post wraps up the series with a deep dive into the North Carolina State House districts, all 120. Needless to say, with that many districts, I'll be putting the numbers and the percentage tables at the end of the piece, with analysis to follow. The analysis is only based on the demographic numbers and percentages; candidate quality (incumbent, challenger, etc.) is not taken into account.

The current map, as has been challenged through several lawsuits, shows the following district lines, with Republicans controlling 76 seats out of the 120 in the chamber:

Deep Dive into the Demographic Dynamics of NC's Districts: Volume 2--NC's State Senate

In the previous post, I looked at the dynamics of voter registration within North Carolina's 13 congressional districts. This post begins a two-part review and analysis of the state's General Assembly districts, first with the 50 districts in the state senate. With much of the attention being paid to NC's congressional districts in this "blue-moon" election cycle, the state legislative races will command state-wide attention, with the Democrats attempting to at least break the Republican's super-majority numbers in both chambers.

The map of the most recently approved upper chamber districts:

Regional Bases and Dynamics of North Carolina's Political Parties

Over at Long Leaf Politics blog, Andrew Dunn took a look at where North Carolina Democrats were focusing their time for the upcoming mid-term elections: while Democrats hope that the suburbs would be battleground to break the Republican's supermajorities in the state's General Assembly, Andrew writes that "any scenario in which the Dems wield any real power statewide requires them to make inroads into rural North Carolina as well." 

In looking at the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections by the state's regional classification (as determined by the U.S. Office of Management & Budget for urban, suburban, and rural counties), while Democratic presidential candidates are strongest in urban counties (which represent 54 percent of the votes cast), the change from 2012 to 2016 showed a widening gap between the parties' presidential candidates in both suburban and rural counties: