It just might be that as North Carolina goes this November, so may go America in 2020.
That’s because this fundamentally blue(ish) state is currently held in thrall by GOP state legislators who are determined to use every trick in the book to cling to absolute power — including tricks like one recently proposed state constitutional amendment to reimpose the draconian voter ID requirement that was rejected in its first incarnation (as a statute) by federal courts in 2016, and yet another amendment to empower Republican state house and senate leaders to appoint all members of the State Board of Elections.
While this fire sale of constitutional amendment ballot measures is mostly intended as a gambit to drive NC’s GOP base voters to the polls this November (witness a third proposed amendment to guarantee the right to hunt and fish), successful outcomes might well cement the GOP’s lock on absolute power in North Carolina for the foreseeable future, absolutely taking the state’s 15 (and rising) electoral votes off the table thanks to systematic state-sponsored voter suppression.
Conscious of this imminent threat, Tar Heel Democrats are fighting hard right now to break the GOP’s veto-proof supermajority in the General Assembly this November, in order to empower our Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, to actually...you know...govern. For the first time in modern history, Dems are fielding candidates in all 120 state House districts this year. Sure, some of those contests are no more than impossible longshots for their Democratic contenders. But many observers like the Democrats’ odds of breaking the veto-proof majority by flipping just four of 120 state house seats this year in a handful of competitive districts that are currently in Republican hands.
A progressive grassroots PAC, Our Shot NC, has crunched the numbers and identified what it considers to be the nine most vulnerable state house seats held by Republicans. Among many other benefits, that effort allows us to ask whether voter registration efforts this year appear to be working in those vulnerable districts to improve Democratic candidates’ odds. We at NC-GoVote have just taken a very deep dive into the state’s voter registration data to answer that question, quantifying trends in those data between the week of March 3rd of this year (when new, court-imposed legislative districts went into effect) and last week.
PARTISAN BALANCE
In this analysis we’ve looked at voter registration trends for a handful of the most critical demographic indicators. The first (and certainly most obvious) of these is the trend in the Democrats-per-Republican ratio for each of the nine competitive districts. An increase in this ratio (i.e., more Democrats per Republican) obviously favors the Democratic candidate’s odds of winning (provided those registrants actually make it to the polls in November). And an increasing trend is just what we see in four of these nine districts.
Now, it must be said that these are small changes we’re talking about (typically on the order of a 200 voter change — or less — over this four-month period) , but NC state house districts are tiny by most states’ standards (just 58,000 voters each), so in a close race — as all nine of these are expected to be — a few hundred votes can make all the difference.
A related measure of changes in partisan advantage concerns the potential impact of unaffiliated voters (those choosing no party when they register). These UNAs are far and away the fastest-growing segment of North Carolina’s electorate, so much so that in some urban counties they’ve pushed the GOP down to ‘minor party’ status (and Dems are fast heading that way, too). To capture this factor, we next looked for changes in the Democratic and Republican parties’ relative ranks in these 9 districts. We found no changes for Democrats, but were surprised to discover that Republicans have slipped, unnoticed, into second place in two districts where they previously commanded the most registrants of any affiliation.
VOTER AGES
It’s axiomatic that a younger electorate leans more liberal than does an older one...which is why NC Republicans go to great efforts to attempt to disenfranchise college students. So next we looked at trends in age distribution in Our Shot NC’s target districts, using the simple yet effective metric of the ratio of age 18-through-29 voters to age 50+ voters. Contrary to our expectation (because young voter registration is on a tear these days), we found this ratio to be declining (thus potentially favoring Republicans) in two of the only three districts displaying any trend at all.
GENDER
Female voters already substantially outnumber male voters in all of these target districts, so we really didn’t expect to see any changing trends in the gender balance of their electorates. But here too we were somewhat surprised. In two of these districts, the males-per-female voter ratio has been trending upward (more males per female), potentially favoring Republicans. In our experience that’s a very unusual trend — perhaps a reflection of Trump’s ability to fire up folks who have routinely shied away from politics until recently. Your guess is as good as ours.
RACE/ETHNICITY
People of color comprise a growing majority of North Carolina’s Democrats, and the largest group among these, African Americans, choose Democratic affiliation over Republican by more than 30-to-1. We found no movement in the ratio of voters of color to non-Hispanic white voters for any of Our Shot NC’s nine target districts (all of which are overwhelmingly white).
THE UPSHOT
On balance, there’s more good news for Democrats than for Republicans in our analysis of voter demographic trends, particularly with respect to trends in party affiliation (Dem:Rep ratio and GOP rank).
The clearest beneficiary of this trend is District 98’s Democratic challenger, Christy Clark, whose district shows the strongest signal of slipping away from Republican domination. But another four Democratic challengers face more positive than negative trends in their own contests, including District 35’s Terrence Everitt, District 62’s Martha Shafer, District 103’s Rachel Hunt, and District 104’s Brandon Lofton. Among this plucky group...as well as their fellow happy warriors in 115 other districts across the state, North Carolina’s people of goodwill look for the state’s future.
Just four seats— that’s all we need to flip to put North Carolina back in a position to help people of goodwill in 49 other states take back our country, as we did in 2008 with Obama’s surprise win here.
If you’re a registered voter in North Carolina, take steps to defend yourself against vote suppressors both foreign and domestic: enroll in NC-GoVote’s free Reg Watch service.