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 |
