An Early Explanation to North Carolina's Constitutional Amendment Votes

With the final number settling in the Old North State's 2018 mid-term election, a number of analyses can be conducted with the data (with more analysis once the voter history data file is released later this month hopefully).

With six constitutional amendments on the 2018 mid-term ballots in North Carolina, a set of questions could be raised, most notably, what explains the vote pattern for the constitutional amendments (of which four of the six amendments passed)?

In thinking about the previous blog post about the impact of Trump's 2016 vote in the 2018 state legislative districts, and the fact that the Trump 2016 vote percentage explained 95 percent or more of the 2018 GOP candidate's vote in the state legislative districts, I started off by looking at the 100 county percentages for each of the 2018 constitutional amendments compared to the 2016 vote percentage for Donald Trump in the counties.

First, the constitutional amendment that had the highest vote 'for' was the victims' rights amendment, which passed with 62 percent of the vote:

Some thoughts on NC Legislative Battles Shaping Up on Nov. 6

With today's release of a new Meredith College Poll, they find that both congressional and state legislative generic ballot questions have Democrats favored by 10 points over Republicans.

This is certainly an eye-popping number, and may reflect the Democratic enthusiasm level (on a scale of 1-10, probably safe to say a 12), but Democrats are facing two important barriers to their blue wave in a blue-moon election cycle in the Old North State.

First, in North Carolina and in the nation, Republicans have had historical advantages when it comes to voter turnout. In a previous post, I noted the turnout rates of registered voters, by party registration, in North Carolina's past elections, going back to the 2002 mid-terms: