Early voting in North Carolina is now over, and the results are interesting. One might be tempted to compare early voting in 2014 to 2010, as both were midterms. But the latter was an easy win for Richard Burr, and this year’s battle in the Senate is shaping up to be a close race, much like 2012.
So what does early voting look like this year compared to 2012?
Here are the relevant 2012 statistics:
Democratic: 47.6 percent
Republican: 31.5 percent
18-29: 13.2 percent
30-44: 21.8 percent
45-59: 29.5 percent
60+: 35.5 percent
White: 67.40 percent
Black: 27.40 percent
Female: 55.90 percent
Male: 43.00 percent
Don’t read too much into the Democratic-Republican split, as North Carolina has a lot of legacy Democrats who are Republican for all intents and purposes (and remember, these figures are for party registration, not self-identification).
So how do things look in 2014?
Dem: 47.6 percent
Rep: 31.9 percent
White: 71.6 percent
Black: 25.0 percent
18-29: 5.1 percent
30-44: 13.7 percent
45-60: 29.1 percent
60+: 52.2 percent
Female: 54.2 percent
Male: 45.0 percent
A few observations:
First, party identification and gender look about the same.
Second, look at race. There has been about a net of 7 points shifted from black to white. This is probably good news for Tillis. African Americans go overwhelmingly Democrat (probably 90-10 or better this cycle) while white voters in North Carolina tend to break 60-40 Republican.
But what really stands out to me is the age brackets. There has been a net shift of about 25 points from the youngest age cohort to the oldest one. That to me is extraordinary, and suggests that a crucial bloc of the 2008/12 Obama coalition — young voters — is not coming out to vote, at least not yet.
To put this into perspective, in 2012 Obama won young voters by 35 points. Romney won voters aged 65 or older by 29 points.
Now, caveats abound. After all, these are early votes. An enormous chunk of the electorate will show up on Election Day, and it could be that the elderly vote advantage is due merely to Republicans getting older folks to vote early. Also: early voting in 2012 was skewed toward the elderly. Young voters made up about 13 percent of the early vote but 19 percent of the total vote. So this huge gap is sure to narrow.
But even then it is still very, very large. The white to black numbers are noteworthy, too. But the older vote totals are truly striking to me.
These cannot be numbers the Hagan campaign likes. Older voters backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by 14 points in 2004. They supported John McCain over Obama by 13 points in 2008 (and went for Elizabeth Dole over Kay Hagan that year by 8 points). Presumably, they went strong for Burr in 2010 (no exit polls that year, but it stands to reason Burr won them by a very large margin). So, these people are probably long time Obama opponents. Hagan has to be banking on a combination of two factors. Either the youth vote surges on Election Day, and/or the elderly vote is so turned off by Tillis that they buck their decade-long opposition to the Democrats in sufficient numbers.
Could it happen? Absolutely. Hagan still has a lead in the polls, which counts for a lot.
Still, some truly striking early voting results by age cohort in the Tar Heel State.
