North Carolina’s early in-person voting closed with Democrats far ahead of where they were two years ago, according to an elections data analyst, and observers on both sides of the aisle took notice.
Zachary Donnini, head of data science at the election data outlet VoteHub, posted the final numbers on Sunday morning, two days before Election Day. By the end of early in-person voting in 2024, Republicans had an edge of 41,457, he wrote. This year, Democrats finished with an edge of 343,548.
“Republicans did not win a single day of early voting,” Donnini wrote. “Even when high-propensity voters were red, those gains were overwhelmed by exceptionally blue turnout among less frequent voters.”
In a follow-up post, Donnini broke down Saturday’s voters by how many of the last four elections they had voted in. Among Republicans who voted that day, 52.3% had voted in all four, compared with 39.8% of Democrats. The Democrats who turned out leaned toward less reliable voters. Of Democrats voting Saturday, 13.7% had voted in just one of the last four elections and 8.8% in none of them. For Republicans, those shares were 9.2% and 5%.
Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman shared Donnini’s post and wrote, “The N.C. GOP delegation has been fretting.”
“OH MY WORD,” wrote Kyle Kulinski, host of the progressive show “Secular Talk.”
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, wrote, “NC is a state known for political trench warfare, but if one side stops pouring resources in, well… we see what happens.”
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, a co-founder of Echelon Insights, wrote, “NC bad. If a tsunami shows up, I expect to be here.” He added a note of caution for his party’s opponents: “But if Republicans can take any comfort from this it’s that there aren’t signs of this level of breakdown anywhere across the true Senate battlegrounds.”
Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, pointed to the state’s Senate race. There, former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper faces former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley.
“What is fascinating about Roy Cooper is how much every group in the Dem Coalition is voting for him,” Tanden wrote. “He’s killing it with young people, Black voters and doing well with the working class. We will see final results on Tuesday. But it’s an interesting race.”
“This is quite the shift,” wrote the progressive media network MeidasTouch.
Early voting figures show who turned out, not how anyone voted. Ballots won’t be counted until polls close Tuesday.
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