NC's First Day of Absentee In-Person Vote Breaks The Record

By Michael Bitzer

If 2020 has taught us anything, it is 'expect the unexpected.'

As we have seen across the nation, but especially in states like Georgia and Texas, early voting (in-person) has exceeded all expectations and has, in fact, been very unexpected in terms of the numbers. 

And North Carolina, in its first day of in-person early voting yesterday, didn't disappoint.

In fact, with 333,134 accepted absentee onestop (the official term for in-person early voting) recorded on October 15, North Carolina surpassed the past three presidential election years numbers for the most one-day early votes cast ever. 

A Month Out from the Deadline, Some Observations on NC's Exponential Absentee by Mail Ballots

By Michael Bitzer

To say that the four of us (Chris Cooper, Whitney Ross Manzo, Susan Roberts, and myself) have been a wee-bit busy over the past few weeks would be a serious understatement. Personally, it has felt like the last week and throes of October's heated campaign, but it's only the end of September. And thus, it's 2020.

But with North Carolina now a month out from the deadline for requesting an absentee by mail ballot (Oct. 27), it's probably a good time to take a step back and look at some trends within the data. 

The Southern Path to the White House

by Charles S. Bullock, III

In media reviews of the prospects for a change in White House occupancy, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin occupy center stage.  Had Donald Trump not knocked these states out of the Blue Wall, he would be firing reality show contestants rather than cabinet members.  Trump won the three states by a combined total of less than show up in most SEC stadiums for football games in non-COVID years.  If Trump loses these states in 2020, it is unlikely that he will win reelection and, accordingly, Trump and his surrogates are campaigning there. 

Lay of the Political Landscape: One For The Books: The Hagan – Tillis 2014 Senate Race

By Susan Roberts

Going into 2020, we are awaiting the outcome of the Trump-Biden showdown, but we need to remind ourselves that every single House and Senate race has its own story to tell.  Following last night's first debate between incumbent Republican Thom Tillis and Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham, here is a brief case study of 2014 race between then Democratic Incumbent Senator Kay Hagan and Republican challenger and Speaker of the N.C. House of Representatives Thom Tillis. If you skip the rest of the article, here are three takeaways that capture the tenor and substance of this race:

• One, the wave giveth, and the wave taketh away. 
• Two, follow the money. 
• Three, you can call North Carolina a battleground state or a swing state or a purple state, just call it competitive and critical.

My focus here is on the Hagan-Tillis race, but I can’t resist the temptation to begin with a few preliminary similarities between the 2014 and current 2020 North Carolina Senate races. Of course, I am speaking as if 2020 is over, but I think these distinctions will remain. Both elections were labelled “toss-ups” by Larry Sabato of Crystal Ball and The Cook Political Report. Both campaigns could capitalize on high presidential disapproval by tethering the incumbent, Hagan to Obama and Tillis to Trump. Both 2014 and 2020 were held during voting law confusion. And sadly, both campaigns were dealing with global health emergencies, Ebola in 2014 and Coronavirus in 2020. 

Early Voting Sites in North Carolina’s 2020 Election

By Chris Cooper

The hangover from the 2000 election took a while to get over. A full year later, folks were dressing up as “hanging chads” for Halloween and “Palm Beach County” soon became known less as a popular retirement destination and more as the home of the “butterfly ballot.” No amount of Goody’s headache powder could save either side from the hangover of the most contested and contentious election of the previous century.

But hangovers aren’t all bad—they usually remind you that you should take better care of yourself. And, for Americans after the 2000 election, the thing we could do to take better care of ourselves was to pay more attention not just to the candidates in the election, but to the process of how we conduct elections—how we design ballots, how we train poll workers, who counts ballots, and where we put polling sites. And, in case the effects of that 20-year-old hangover were beginning to fade, along comes to 2020 to remind us that attention to election administration is key to a well-functioning democracy.

Keeping the Youth Vote Alive in a Time of Uncertainty

 The Asheville Citizen Times has been kind enough to give me some space to write about the 2020 election about once a month. This month's column is about the youth vote in 2020 (specifically the difficulties of reaching college students in a pandemic). I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog. Please  click through to read the whole piece and, if you're not already a subscriber, please consider a subscription to the Citizen Times.

By Chris Cooper

Every four years, gallons of ink are spilled over the youth vote and its importance for the outcome of the election and the future of our democracy.

This attention is well-deserved. Historically, the size of the youth vote pales in comparison to the size of the electorate among older demographics, but youth turnout has inched up in recent years.  According to data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University in 2018, 28% of young people voted in 2018, the highest midterm turnout in some time.

Please click through to read the rest https://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/2020/09/07/keeping-youth-vote-alive-nc-time-uncertainty-opinion/5709106002/ 

---

Chris Cooper is Madison Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University. He tweets at @chriscooperwcu

Two Weeks Out from NC Mailing Out Ballots, And The Requests Are Nearly 400K

By Michael Bitzer

On September 4, 2020, North Carolina's 100 counties will send out the first batch of absentee by mail ballots to those voters who have requested them. And at the current trajectory, the Old North State could see a record-breaking number of ballots mailed.

For the past month, I've been keeping an almost daily track (taking off some Saturdays, due to no numbers being reported) of the requests from the counties that are compiled in a state board of elections report. And pretty much every morning, I'm astounded at the level of requests that continue to flood in. 

Back a month ago, on July 13, I provided the first analysis of an estimated number of requests that the state had received: nearly 70,000. Two weeks later, the number of requests stood at nearly 100,000. On August 10, we were at 163,000 ballot requests. 

Episode 2 of the ONSP "Vlog": Candidates, Conventions, and Campaigns in the Age of COVID

It's been over a month since our inaugural "vlog" (or video-log) from the four of us, and as we get ready for the fall semester, we thought it would be a good time to get the crew back together and discuss the news of the week so far: Joe Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as his vice presidential nominee, the upcoming virtual DNC and RNC, and how candidates are going to deal with campaigning in this COVID environment. And a few other random topics that you can now find in two formats:

The first version of our Episode 2 is on Youtube, found here:

We've also made the vlog into a podcast, hosted on Soundcloud and found here, along with the inaugural vlog/now in podcast format. 

Thanks as always for reading and watching/listening to the Old North State Politics! 

NC's Requests for Absentee by Mail Ballots Continues Its Exponential Growth

By Michael Bitzer

A month ago, on July 13, I wrote a piece that North Carolina had nearly 70,000 requests for absentee by mail (ABM) ballots. Two weeks ago, I wrote an update that North Carolina's requests for ABM ballots would hit 100,000 sometime that week. Little did I realize that within two days of posting that, the requests did pass 100K. And as of today (Monday, August 10), we are working our way towards 200,000 requests (again, I'll say for fun) likely within the next week. 

As of August 10, the total requests so far is 163,374, which is 70 percent of 2016's total requests (a little over 231,000) and 82 percent of the final ABM ballots that were submitted and accepted for ballots cast (a little under 200,000). In considering this number of total requests so far, North Carolina is currently 7 times ahead of the same day total requests in 2016. 

As I do on the Twitter account for the blog in greater detail, I'll give the general trends, followed by a breakdown of an important voter characteristic, and then provide what could be a model for looking ahead to an important date of Friday, September 4, when the first batch of absentee by mail ballots are scheduled to be mailed to voters.

The Surprisingly Long History of Vote-by-Mail Debates in North Carolina (link inside)

The Asheville Citizen Times has been kind enough to give me some space to write about the 2020 election about once a month. This month's column is about the (surprisingly long) history of vote-by-mail debates in North Carolina and I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog. Please consider clicking through to read the whole piece and, if you're not already a subscriber, please consider a subscription to the Citizen Times.

By Chris Cooper  

 

It’s hard to turn on the television, click on a web site or scroll through your social media feed without reading or hearing someone declare that our current political moment is unprecedented. And, to some degree, they’re right. After all, political polarization is the highest it’s been since the Civil War, we’re only a few months since the president of the United States was impeached and the country is facing a pandemic the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century. At the same time, treating all political debates as if they are unprecedented and something that can only happen in today’s political environment can obscure patterns that can help us better understand our current political situation.