Note: This literally is breaking, as I'm breaking it; I haven't seen anything about turnout of newly registered voters in any articles.
Of course, technically, there's no such thing as a 'must-win' state (i.e. if McCain wins Pennsylvania, he can lose IA, NM, CO AND one other state [as long as that state is not FL, OH or TX] and he'd still win). But North Carolina is pretty darn close.
More importantly, North Carolina's current early voting numbers provide a window into the enthusiasm level and a partial answer to the "Will they turnout?" question that, along with the Bradley effect and the traditional Republican skill at scaring the electorate in the final days, is one of the biggest worries of Democrats.
They, of course, refers to blacks, young people, newly registered voters and anyone else who is considered to be a "less-than-likely" voter.
The numbers as they currently stand in North Carolina, below the fold.
Today, North Carolina released a summary of demographics of the North Carolinians registering to vote in 2008.
Specifically, they provided us party, race and age.
First note:
In 2004, there was a net increase of 493,376 voters between the beginning of the year and the end of the registration period.
However, during that time period, the Democratic registration marginal advantage (which exists in North Carolina, like in Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Florida, because of the still-existing legacy of Democratic dominance in the state that at least until relatively recently, persisted at the state level; as a result, many registered Democrats in these areas never vote for any national Democrat [or in many of those cases, never vote for almost any Democrat, period] declined from 13.11% to 12.31%; in November of 1993, the earliest available year, it was a 27.14% margin advantage. By the beginning of 2008, it had declined to 10.56%.
This year up to today (I believe people can still register at the polls in NC up until November 1st), there were 862,527 new registrations for a net gain of 579,858.
Today, we have increased our registration advantage to 13.52%, and Republicans now make up a smaller percentage of registered voters than they did in November of 1993 (most of the change in registration has been a decline in the percentage of Democrats and an increase in the percentage of unaffiliated voters; Republicans peaked at 34.75% in the beginning of 2006, and are now down to 32.08%).
African-Americans have gone from 20.13% of registered voters to 21.34% of registered voters from the beginning of this year to the most recent numbers.
Of course, that doesn't tell us whether or not any of these newly registered voters will be turning out.
However, I have crunched the numbers, with the help of data available at the North Carolina Board of Elections website and my good friends, UNIX utilities cut, sed, wc, grep and comm.
The numbers are, as I said, unbelievable:
Demographic | % of the Total Turnout So Far (% of registered voters in parentheses) | % of the total registered members of demographic that have voted so far |
All Voters | 100% (100%) | 10.17% |
Black Voters | 29.15% (21.34%) | 13.92% |
Registered Democrats | 56.41% (45.61%) | 12.57% |
Registered Republicans | 27.08% (32.08%) | 8.58% |
All Voters Newly Registered in 2008 | 13.04% (13.95%) | 9.52% |
Registered Democrats Newly Registered in 2008 | 7.66% (6.76%) | 11.53% |
Registered Republicans Newly Registered in 2008 | 2.38% (3.01%) | 8.04% |
In other words, with the exception of "all newly registered voters", two of the three "unlikely" demographics are turning out quite a bit MORE than the percentage of all registered voters they make up.
In other words, this is great news for Barack Obama and all Democrats running (assuming the same is going on in other states, which seems likely based on the numbers in Georgia and Florida)