How the North Carolina Electorate Has Changed
Democrats’ path back to a legislative majority
The key to understanding North Carolina’s electorate is to grasp just how quickly our state is changing. North Carolina is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, with a steady influx of both domestic and foreign migrants that has fueled a long economic expansion. That expansion has created an electorate that is becoming younger, more diverse and much less tethered to the regressive politics of North Carolina’s past. Even since 2016, there has been a significant acceleration of these trends that makes our goal of a Democratic trifecta — nearly unthinkable just eight years ago — a very real possibility this fall.
Gradually, then Suddenly
The story of the North Carolina electorate is that of the urban/rural divide so familiar across the country. In our state, just 5 counties — Wake, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Forsyth and Durham — make up one third of the entire electorate. Those counties, respectively, contain Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and (of course) Durham. If you go further down the list, the next counties on the list are either smaller cities or suburbs: Cumberland (Fayetteville), Buncombe (Asheville), New Hanover (Wilmington), Union, Gaston and Cabarrus (Charlotte suburbs). Altogether, those top 11 counties comprise fully half of the North Carolina electorate. You have to get down to the 16th largest county by registered voters (Iredell) before you find one that isn’t mostly a major city or suburb.
As you can see, North Carolina’s growth — in population, politically, economically, demographically, otherwise — has been very concentrated around its major urban centers — especially the Raleigh/Durham area and Charlotte. In the bottom 88 counties of the state, the electorate has grown by something like 200,000 voters since 2016, while the top 12 have grown roughly the same. Since May of 2018, Wake and Mecklenburg counties alone have added almost 70,000 registered voters, while the “bottom 95” counties have actually lost over 17,000.
North Carolina allows partisan voter registration, as well as “Unaffiliated.” Democrats have long held an edge here — there are nearly 25% more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, with “Unaffiliated” somewhere in between. “Unaffiliated” voters will probably soon pass Democrats as the largest voter registration choice. Here, again, the “Big 5” counties are a trend all their own. Democrats outnumber Republicans almost 2:1 in Mecklenburg, while in Durham county, the figure is almost 5:1. Outside the Big 5 counties, the numbers level out quickly. Statewide, Democrats have lost registrants, Republicans have gained a small number, and “Unaffiliated” has exploded, eclipsing both. A large majority of the newly registered voters in NC since 2016 are Unaffiliated.
Yet we have clues as to who these voters are.
For one, we know the racial makeup of new voters is very mixed. Voter registration in North Carolina allows one to choose a racial category. Voters who chose “White” have increased by a paltry 17,757 since May of 2016; “Black,” 25,699; “Hispanic,” 74,782; and the number of new voters choosing “Other,” by 348,444.
“Other” as a racial category has increased in nearly every county, but almost half the increase is in the Big 5 counties. Even outside the Big 5, “Other” has increased its share of the electorate by almost 6.5 points — mostly at the expense of whites. Whites, as a group, have steadily lost ground for a long time. They still represent a majority of the voter base, but an ever-smaller one, representing a smaller share in every county and in the state at large. (In Durham, whites are no longer an outright majority of voters.) The reasonable assumption is that some heretofore “Whites” are re-registering as “Other” as a racial category, though no one knows just how many that really is. It’s very likely that the “Other” group encompasses not just East and South Asian populations (of which North Carolina has many), but also the burgeoning category of multiracial voters. Whoever they are, there are almost a quarter million more of them than there were just in May of 2018.
Among those new registrants since 2018 include one heck of a lot of young people. Of new registrants since the 2018 election, almost a quarter were born in or after the year 2000. This is almost certainly heavily weighted towards the Big 5. The gender breakdown, too, is quite clear. In every single county in the state, women now outnumber men as registered voters — sometimes by fairly wide margins.
If one were to try describing the North Carolina electorate as a whole, this might do: it is becoming even more urban and suburban, much more diverse, less party-aligned and younger. And all of that, very quickly.
What this looks like in real life
Let’s take a look at what North Carolina’s changing electorate actually means for Democrats running for office.
Cabarrus County, just northeast of Charlotte, is a part of the larger Charlotte metropolitan area. The area has seen massive growth in the last two decades that has changed its political landscape considerably. This year, the Long Leaf Pine Slate is proud to support two candidates for the state House — Aimy Steele (District 82) and Gail Young (District 83) — both in Cabarrus. Both women ran in 2018 and lost by hair-thin margins: 1,978 and 1,558 votes, respectively.
Cabarrus County’s Republican/Democratic registered voter numbers have crept up more or less in lockstep, with a slight Republican edge in a pool of about 141,000 voters. But the number of Unaffiliateds has risen dramatically: up 10,581 since 2016, more than 4 times the growth in Republican or Democratic registrations. In just the last 24 months, the county has added nearly 4,600 new Unaffiliated registered voters. Virtually all of those new voters are Black, Hispanic, and, especially, “Other” — the number of White voters has barely changed.
In a suburban/exurban county where legislative races are decided by a percentage point or two, adding thousands of new registered voters is game-changing. What’s more, these new voters are not moved by classic Republican appeals. North Carolina Republicans are, by now, best known for gerrymandering, racist voter suppression, corporate cronyism and never-ending culture war (think “bathroom bills” and same-sex marriage bans). These are not appeals tailored to a multiracial younger couple in the Charlotte suburbs.
In District 83, we also have the benefit of a true loony bin Republican opponent in Larry Pittman, who enjoys occasional digressions on why Abraham Lincoln was similar to Hitler and why teachers should be armed with handguns. The Republican running in District 82, Kristin Baker, is less vocal, but her hard conservative stances are so unpopular that she is relying on corporate PACs to fund her 67% of her campaign.
The Path to a Trifecta
This fall, North Carolina Democrats have a path to a majority of both chambers of the General Assembly, as well as a likely win for the governorship. We have written about this before — but now, readers will begin to see the electorate that will take us there.
In the 2016 state legislative elections, about 4.2 million North Carolinians voted. Republicans won with a margin of about 221,000 votes — about 5 points. Despite the close finish, gerrymandered maps awarded Democrats only about a third of the seats in the state House/Senate. In the 2018 legislative elections, however, 3.7 million voters gave Democrats a majority of votes by around 87,000 votes — a margin of around 2.5 points. Even though they won a majority of votes cast, due to gerrymandering, Democrats didn’t come anywhere close to winning a majority of seats. In fact, they were barely able to break the Republican supermajority — in the Senate, by just 1 vote.
That’s what makes this fall so critical. With new, court-ordered maps and a Presidential year turnout, Democrats have a once-in-a-decade opportunity to finally break the crooked Republican gerrymander.
Hundreds of thousands of new voters have joined the North Carolina electorate. The Republican party’s unrelenting stream of racism and MAGA-style politics is unlikely to attract these new voters. Now more than ever, this year represents our opportunity. The question is not so much whether there will be another “blue wave” election, but rather — how large will it be? Will we get a 3-point shift, or a 6-point one? Those represent different scenarios for the districts we need to win.
Democrats in North Carolina have the right candidates in the right places. But we’re up against a wave of corporate PAC money that is flooding in to protect the rigged Republican majority. The Long Leaf Pine Slate is the only independent progressive organization in North Carolina focused solely on funding our critical-path Democratic candidates needed to win back a majority. If you can, please support the Slate. Together, we’re going to turn the Old North State blue again.
The Long Leaf Pine Slate is dedicated to breaking the Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly. Learn more about us at LongLeafPineslate.org and follow us on Twitter at @ForwardCarolina.
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