By Christopher Cooper
After 35 days of early voting in 2022, the song remains (mostly) the same as it was during the last three weeks of updates. The volume of requested and returned mail ballots remains above 2018 and below 2020, Democrats continue to dominate mail voting, and the demographics are shifting slightly from recent years.
Want details? Of course you do.
By Whitney Ross Manzo and Michael Bitzer
With the new (and temporary) congressional map, it may just make sense to say “here’s what we know for this coming election—after Nov. 8, all bets are off” kind of approach when it comes to analyzing the U.S. House of Representative districts for the upcoming general election.
In conducting our some of our analysis, we utilized the "Big 3" combined election results from 2020: U.S. president, U.S. Senate, and the N.C. governor's contests. Taking the precinct results from these three and assigning them into the Interim Congressional District Map, we arrive at a spread of the congressional districts, from strong Republican to most competitive to strong Democratic (we define "strong" as being 60 percent or over for one party; "likely" for one party as between 55-59 percent for that party; and "competitive but lean to one party" as 50-54 percent for that party, based on the combined results for the three 2020 contests).
Using this combined 2020 election results, we can then classify what might be the potential voting 'behavior' of the congressional districts, with an understanding that past NC voting patterns are very close in relationship to future voting patterns.