There are now more Republican registered voters in North Carolina than Democrats. What Does This Mean for Our State's Politics?

 by Christopher Cooper

Normally, the weekly voter registration updates on the North Carolina State Board of Elections are met with a collective shrug from all but the most dedicated, data oriented, and dorky observers of the state’s politics.1

There have really only been three notable exceptions to that rule: September 2017 when Unaffiliated crossed Republican to become the second largest group of registered voters in the state, March 2022 when Unaffiliated became the largest number of registered voters in the state and yesterday when, for the first time in the state’s history, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats in North Carolina.

In October I wrote a piece for The Assembly about this shift—what it means and why it matters. I encourage you to read it in the context of what just happened.2 Some primary things to keep in mind are:

A Softening, But Not a Flip: North Carolina's Partisan Identification Shifted Late in 2025

By Michael Bitzer

With 2025 concluded and the start of what will be an intense 2026, I was reviewing the past year’s Catawba College-YouGov surveys of North Carolinians (1) to see what interesting patterns or trends occurred over the year.

One thing that stood out to me (because of its potential implications for electoral volatility in a presidential-to-midterm transition year) was a fairly consistent pattern of the state’s partisan identification—that is, until the final survey of 2025.

As part of a standard set of questions asked in each Catawba-YouGov poll, respondents can initally say what their partisan identification is: Democrat, Republican, Independent, other, or not sure. Another question asks for the respondents’ ‘strength’ of their initial partisan identification, meaning for partisans ‘are you strong or not very strong’ in your identity, while among those who initially say they are ‘Independent,’ do they lean to one party or the other, or do they consider themselves a ‘pure’ independent.

Starting with the first Catawba-YouGov Survey in August 2024, the partisan self-identifications of the surveys showed a pretty consistent pattern over the past year, until the last survey.

Figure 1: Catawba-YouGov 2024-2025 Surveys with initial partisan identifications among North Carolina Respondents.