North Carolina is seen as a swing state in the presidential election for the first time in many decades. It has voted Republican every year since 1976 and may well do it again, but not without a fight from the grassroots movement led by the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Whether it goes blue or stays red is not the major issue in this campaign. Instead, voter turnout and specifically early voting has been the story so far. In 2004, there were 3,552,449 votes cast in the presidential election. In the two weeks that polls have been opened, 2,078,050 (as of 10/31 at 5:25 am) have voted in 2008. Let’s do some number crunching to see what this means thus far in N.C.
The N.C. State Board of Elections says that there are 2,841,111 Democrats, 1,991,497 Republicans, 3,225 Libertarians, and 1,384,652 unaffiliated voters registered in the state, for a total of 6,220,485. The 2004 numbers looked like this: 2,584,307 Democrats; 1,912,003 Republicans; 13,025 Libertarians; and 1,025,463 unaffiliated. Democratic and unaffiliated have both risen dramatically while Republican registration has stayed very constant.
Voting has only been going on for 14 days, which means an average of 148,432 people have voted each day. If this continues for the next two days, a total of 2,374,914 people will have voted. More than likely the number will increase with a rush to get early votes in on the last two days; therefore we’ll say 2,450,000 will have voted early. This will be 69% of the votes that were cast in 2004. Maybe we can get close to the 6.2 million registered voters. I’m hoping for 4.5 million (at least). That would be 1 million more voters than in 2004. It is going to be an intense weekend in the swing state that is now North Carolina!
Below is a breakdown of all the numbers, showing that there is a huge turnout on the Democratic side and that more women are voting than men. But my one question: Who are the 0.2% of unknown sex?
Voted Early
Dem 52.6%
Rep 29.6%
None 17.8%
White 69.3%
Black 26.6%
Other 4.0%
18-29 13.2%
30-44 21.9%
45-64 41.2%
65+ 23.8%
Men 42.7% 42.9%
Women 56.5% 56.6%
Unk 0.2% 0.4%
Welcome to New Raleigh. We welcome your participation in the ongoing discussion. Before posting we ask that you read our Comment Policy and we invite you to register with our site. If you want to keep up with the news on our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed or get emailed every time we post.