How Might Politics Impact NC's County COVID Vaccination Percentages?

By Michael Bitzer

As with many things nowadays, partisanship and polarization has infected many aspects of our society; not just our political lives, but things that 'normally' one might consider apolitical. With the intensity of what we see in our polarized environment, pretty much any issue, especially those seen as a public policy, becomes framed in partisan dimensions. 

Recently, political scientist Seth Masket at the University of Denver noted that the relationship between how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election and its percentage of adults who have received at least one COVID vaccine is "remarkably strong," at a level of 0.85 correlation which is something social scientists "almost never see this high a correlation between variables." This relationship was also found by another political scientist, Tom Pepinsky, regarding county-level data.

In fact, Masket found that vaccination rates are a "better predictor" of state voting patterns than what we normally think of as predictive (read, in statistical language, independent) variables such as race, education, or other demographic factors. 

Beyond just analyzing the fifty states, Masket analyzed Colorado's counties to evaluate the role of vaccination and voting patterns in 2020, and found another remarkable correlation/relationship between the two (at 0.835, where a 1.0 would mean the two variables are identical in their relationship and that one variable perfectly explains the other variable).

For those of us who study state politics and are interested in a particular state, this type of analysis is fairly simple: take the 2020 county-level election results (say, the 100 counties of North Carolina and their vote for Trump) and the vaccination rates by counties and see how the two numbers relate to each other. 

What effects might the "Great Cessation" have on North Carolina's counties?

By Whitney Manzo

“Doggone scary” and “grim” are two ways one state lawmaker has described North Carolina’s state budget outlook after learning that we’re looking at a $4 billion shortfall during the next two years due to the economic impacts of Covid-19. The state budget director has also said North Carolina will experience a recession soon, if it isn’t already here.

But what about county budgets? After all, these local governments have arguably been even harder hit than the state, given that counties run many of the hospitals that care for Covid-19 patients and administer many of the state’s welfare programs that help families get through business closures and unemployment. Since counties run elections, too, they’ve been doing all this while trying to administer the upcoming 2020 election cycle; no small feat in a “normal” year, it’s been a nightmare trying to safely conduct representative democracy in the midst of a pandemic.

Luckily, I have a dataset that covers all 100 North Carolina counties from 2006-2018 and I can calculate what we might expect regarding county budgets by looking at what happened from 2009-2011, the years directly following the Great Recession. Because budgets are generally decided one year in advance, we must begin our analysis one year past the start of the Great Recession (some say it began in December 2007, but we’re going to just go with 2008 as the starting year).

Looking at all North Carolina counties together, from 2009 to 2010, 70% of counties experienced a decrease in their budget. Half of those were double-digit decreases. The largest cuts were experienced by Durham County, which cut its budget from the 2008-2009 fiscal year by a shocking 40%, and Iredell County, which cut its budget by 35%. This is all the more striking considering that Durham County grew by over 5,500 people in that time, and Iredell County grew by 2,300 people. So, at the same time that these counties were experiencing rapid expansion in the number of residents they need to serve, they were also drastically cutting services.

Post-COVID-19 precipitous drop in NC voter registration

By Michael Bitzer

With the end of May and now the Phase 2 reopening of North Carolina (even though COVID-19 cases in the state are increasing), many are wondering about the economic impact on the state from the stay-at-home order from mid-March. From my point of view and research interest, another area is about voter registration and what has happened over the first five months of 2020. Articles are drawing attention on the drop of new voters across the nation since the pandemic began, and recent actions by the NC General Assembly have sought to loosen the requirements on using absentee vote-by-mail for this year's election.

In looking at the May 30, 2020 voter registration data file from the North Carolina Board of Elections, there was a significant drop in new voter registration in April and May:

To have gone from nearly 80,000 registered voters at the beginning of the year down to less than 20,000 seems to be a significant drop. Some might speculate, well, after a primary election in March, wouldn't voter registration trail off and then pick back up with the beginning of the fall campaign?