Note: Unless Sarah Palin is Elizabeth Dole in disguise, this diary has nothing to do with her or her fertile family, and that alone is reason enough to read it.
A series on trends in voter registration
In early August, the New York Times revealed that since 2005, there has been a major shift in party registration, with the Republicans losing ground to Democrats and to unaffiliated voters. But what caused these shifts? How large have they been in key states? Have there been any demographic shifts? How will they help the Democratic party's chances at victory this November?
The answer can be found below.
North Carolina is one of the 3 states (along with LA and FL) which both registers voters by party and by race. Moreover, it's one of the two southern states where the Southern Strategy had peaked even before the new recent trends, leading to the Democratic resurgence in both states that has Barack Obama fighting hard to win.
In addition to Obama, North Carolina features a high-profile Governor's race, Senatorial race and Congressional race. Our quest to win them all is greatly helped by recent registration trends.
As in other Southern states, Democratic registration has declined drastically; before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, North Carolina was part of the Solid South, with several exceptions. For instance, the western parts of North Carolina (in the Appalachians) had significant "mountain white" populations who had union sympathies in the Civil War and thus often elected Republicans.
Also, the Charlotte area started moving toward the Republicans early on.
Charles Raper Jonas (and they say Hussein is a damaging middle name!) was elected to Congress from the Charlotte area in 1952.
The Republican gains continued in North Carolina, as in the rest of the South, reaching a height of 8 of the 12 Congressional seats in the 1994 Gingrich revolution.
However, recently, thanks in no small part to the movement of the "creative classes" into the state, particularly into the Research Triangle, North Carolina has been experiencing a Democratic resurgence.
We took back the North Carolina State House in 2004. In 2006, we increased our majorities in both houses of the state legislature, sent Heath Shuler to Congress from the far-western NC-11 district, and missed sending Larry Kissell to Congress by less than 500 votes.
This year, we've got a real chance at sending Larry Kissell to Congress, Kay Hagan to the Senate, and 15 electoral votes to Barack Obama, with an outside chance at sending heroic Navy Vet Dan Johnson to Congress, replacing the extremely odious Patrick McHenry.
So, again, the registration trends for Democrats up until the beginning of this year appear to be extremely disheartening.
Of course, back in the early 1990's, there was still a very significant number of legacy Democrats who retained their Democratic registration yet only intermittently supported Democratic candidates, especially at the federal level. At the state level, they may have continued voting Democratic.
That small uptick at the beginning of this year is thanks to the determination of the junior Senator from the great state of New York, Hillary Clinton.
Her decision to stay in until the end meant there was a focus on the Democratic primary, leading people to register as Democrats. While there was almost certainly some switching by Republicans, as they only netted 1,207 more registered voters between March 8th and May 10th, while the Democrats netted 91,220 new voters and there was a net increase of 45,048 unaffiliated voters, it likely was not that significant, as, after all, it wasn't enough to cause an outright decrease in registered voters.
While Democrats have declined precipitously as a percentage of registered voters in North Carolina, Republicans have not seen a similar gain.
In fact, today, Republicans make up a smaller percentage of registered voters than they did back in November of 1994.
The trend in North Carolina has been more towards unaffiliated voters, who have gone from 8% of registered voters in 1993 to 21.9% of registered voters today.
On the racial front, registration trends are all good, as African-Americans have increased from 17.74% of registered voters in 1993 to 20.85% of registered voters at present.
Moreover, due to simultaneous increases in the registration share of Asians (largely in the Research Triangle) and Hispanics (statewide), white registration has decreased from 81.18% in 1993 to 74.92% today.
Thanks to Senator Barack Obama's position at the top of the ticket, we can reasonably expect higher-than-average turnout among African-American voters.
In 2004, African-Americans made up 20.16% of registered voters, but were only 18.64% of those turning out to vote, which mirrors past trends. Given the increases in registration and the expected higher-than-usual turnout, it's reasonable to expect that African-Americans will make up an additional 2% or more of those casting votes, or, to put in another way, it would have more than halved Richard Burr's margin of victory over Erskine Bowles, probably decreasing it to a little bit over 1%. This makes Kay Hagan (and perhaps even Barack Obama's) job at winning the state of North Carolina significantly less daunting.
For Larry Kissell in North Carolina's 8th district, the figures are even more stunning. See, in 2006, African-Americans made up 27.12% of
registered voters in the 8th district, but were a mere 22.88% of those turning out to vote. The most recent data I compiled
has African-Americans making up 28.43% of registered voters in his district.
As you might recall, Hayes won by the skin of his teeth, by a mere 329 votes, a 0.28% margin.
Assuming Kissell won 90% of the black vote and 60% of the neither-white-nor-black vote (these are educated guesses coming from you-know-where), he won about 37.1% of the white vote in 2006.
Adjusting using those assumptions for a 8,838 increase in the number of blacks voting (bringing blacks to 28% of those voting instead of 22.88%), Larry Kissell would have won in 2006, 52.4-47.6%. More to the point, under the scenario where blacks make up 28% of those voting, Kissell's share of the white vote could decrease to 34% and yet he would still win.
While it's possible that the whites turning out in 2006 were either somewhat more or somewhat less favorable to Larry than the white electorate at large was (only 35% of registered white voters cast a ballot that fall, whereas it's likely 2/3 of registered white voters will vote in the coming presidential election), in all likelihood, thanks to changes in registration and expected changes in turnout, Larry can actually do a few points worse among white voters compared to 2006 and still beat Robin Hayes.