By Michael Bitzer
As I post this on Tuesday, August 6, we have the great mystery solved of who Kamala Harris will pick as her vice presidential nominee: Minnesota governor Tim Walz. I'm sure my colleagues and I will have more to say about the finalized Democratic ticket against the Trump-Vance Republican ticket in the future, but I wanted to post some further information on what we've seen in North Carolina politics over the past two weeks.
As my colleague Chris Cooper has noted, it appears there's a some kind of "Harris Effect" on NC voter registration. In the two weeks post Biden's departure and Harris's elevation to be the Democratic presidential nominee, Chris notes that registration for Democrats has surpassed Republicans, whereas Republicans were above Democrats in the two weeks prior to the July 21 announcement.
As a deeper dive, I posted on Bluesky & Twitter/X some further analysis of the trends in voter registration for the month of July, specifically looking at the period July 6 (the first Saturday of the month that the NC State Board of Elections gave us the weekly update on voter registration) through August 2 (to conclude the analysis).
To conduct this analysis, I merged the July 6 with the August 2 NC voter registration data via the NCID 'key' for each voter (a unique identifier that stays with the voter) and then separated out the voters who were not registered on July 6 but were registered on August 2. That pool of voters is 34,180 new NC registered voters, with the following daily numbers in the period.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Voter Registrations by Day |
You can see an obvious increase in the week of July 22, with a downward shift in the second week of July 29. There may still be registrations being processed in the 100 counties that could see the second week's daily totals increase, so there's that caveat.
First, in looking at party registration of new NC voters during the month of July, we see a partisan shift from pre-July 21 to after.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Daily Voter Registration by Party Registration |
This unaffiliated dominance isn't surprising, simply due to who is registering: namely, Millennials and Generation Z, who are more likely than not to register non-partisan.
Within the generational cohorts, Gen Z and Millennials held dominance over July, but there was a noticeable shift on July 21.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Daily Voter Registration by Generation Cohort |
Prior to Biden's departure on July 21, Gen Z and Millennials were basically tied in terms of registrations. But after Biden's exit, Gen Z voters dominated the first week in terms of numbers, and held over Millennials in the second week.
You can also see this in the percentage of voters by generation, with the clear demarcation of July 21 and the boast of Gen Z registrants.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Daily Voter Registration by Generation Percentage |
In looking at new voters and their race-ethnicity, no real difference appears evident from the pre- to post-July 21 time period.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Daily Voter Registration by Voter Race/Ethnicity |
The one surprising aspect (to me at least) is when you look at the voters' gender in the pre- and post-Biden announcement periods.
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| July 6 through August 2 NC Daily Voter Registration by Voter Gender |
First, a word about the data regarding voter gender: much like with race-ethnicity, more and more NC voters are declining to 'check the box' when it comes to specifying gender.
In this sample, a quarter of new registrants did not check either "male" or "female", so we're operating with a smaller size of those who did. Of those who did, before Biden's withdrawal, it was a very close divide between male and female. After Biden's announcement, women took a good majority of the new registrants over the following two weeks.
All this being said: we'll also need to watch and see what this 'pool' of new NC registered voters do come November's election: meaning, do they actually turn out to vote.
Now that we have a presidential and vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket, we should continue to watch what, if any, energy and motivation will drive new voters heading to the October 11 deadline for November's general election (and yes, new voters can still register after that with voting in person and registering at the same time, known as one-stop voting).
It is certainly crunch time for both parties and campaigns to get voters registered, but the crucial factor facing both 'teams' will be the motivation and turn out dynamic they bring for their voters. The next few weeks we'll see how enthusiasm and energy drive the campaigns and ultimately the voters' choices.
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Dr. Michael Bitzer holds the Leonard Chair of Political Science and is the incoming director of the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College, where he is a professor of politics and history. You can find him on most social media platforms with some variation of @BowTiePolitics.
