Early voting in North Carolina ended Saturday afternoon with a surge of Black voters heading to the polls. Comparing the Sunday final report with the Saturday 6 am report, of the final 60,708 early voters in the Democratic primary, 47.8% were Black and 47.6% white (the remainder were American Indian, Asian, or no race was listed on their registration record.)
Based on the state maintained early voter database, of the 387,049 Democratic primary ballots, 40.6% were cast by Black voters and 57.3% by whites.
Early voting in North Carolina ended Saturday afternoon with a surge of Black voters heading to the polls. Comparing the Sunday final report with the Saturday 6 am report, of the final 60,708 early voters in the Democratic primary, 47.8% were Black and 47.6% white (the remainder were American Indian, Asian, or no race was listed on their registration record.)
Final early voting totals showed 387,049 Democratic ballots cast (326,090 Democrats + 60,959 Unaffiliated), 82,803 GOP ballots cast (73,164 Republicans + 9,639 unaffiliated) and 1,026 unaffiliated voters just voted the nonpartisan judicial ballot.
Based on the state maintained early voter database, of the Democratic ballots, 40.6 were cast by Black voters and 57.3% by whites.
See my diaries at http://www.dailykos.com/... and http://www.dailykos.com/... for methodology and earlier numbers. Voter records include race because of the Voting Rights Act, enabling detailed analysis
37.7% of registered Democrats are black according to North Carolina State Board of Elections statistics, while of registered Democrats casting early votes, 44.7% are Black. Just 11.0% of unaffiliated voters are Black, but 19.0% of the unaffiliated voters casting early voting ballots are Black.
Brian Shaffner of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies blogged about this surge today at http://ccpsblog.blogspot.com/... The post is an excellent read, I clip just a small part of his analysis.
I have now posted several times on the composition of early voters in North Carolina. My last post analyzed those who had voted early through Thursday (May 1st). Since then, there has been a huge spike in the number of early voters.
adding
The most remarkable figure to note here is that 40% of early voters were African-American, a figure that is up from 37% earlier this week. It is important to note that most of the polls being conducted in North Carolina are assuming African-American turnout of about one-third; if it is closer to 40%, then this clearly will advantage Obama... So, Obama is almost certainly ahead by a significant amount at this point. The question is whether the composition of the electorate voting on the day of the primary will look like early voters. If it does, then Obama should have a very good day.
Note when you view Shaffner's daily NC early voting turnout graph, http://bp0.blogger.com/... while there was a drop in voting from Friday to Saturday, the 90,000 voters Friday covered 8 hours of polling, while the 60,000 on Saturday represented the 4 hours that polls were open in 97 of the 100 counties, a huge spike in voters per hour. (three small counties had more hours Saturday)