Election Day is in one week. And there are five days left of early, in-person voting. WFAE’s Morning Edition host Marshall Terry spoke with WFAE’s Steve Harrison about what the early voting numbers suggest so far about the election — and why the results could indicate trouble for Republicans.
TERRY: Steve, let’s first look at the big picture before we jump into what the numbers suggest will happen. Lots of people have voted so far!
HARRISON: That’s an understatement.
Nearly 1.6 million North Carolinians have already voted early, mostly in-person.
At this same point in the 2022 midterms, only 1.16 million people had cast ballots. So, a half-million more ballots cast.
Mail voting is down this year compared to 2022. That might be because President Trump keeps saying it’s fraudulent and trying to limit mail voting. But mail voting is always a small amount of overall ballots in this state. It looks like people are just switching to early in-person voting.
TERRY: OK, so a massive increase over 2022. Now let’s look at just who has turned out to vote.
HARRISON: The big story here is the lack of enthusiasm on the Republican side. Registered Republicans make up just under 24% of all the people who have cast ballots so far.
And in raw numbers, nearly twice as many registered Democrats have cast ballots so far compared to registered Republicans.
Again, let’s compare that to 2022, which was a good year for Republicans. Ted Budd won the U.S. Senate seat over Democrat Cheri Beasley. At this point in the election, registered Republicans had cast 31% percent of the votes.
And now let’s compare that to the 2018 midterms, which was a good year for Democrats. Even then, GOP voters were 31% of the voting pool.
So this year is a big, big drop - even compared to two very different midterms.
TERRY: But Republicans have been digging out of their deficit, right?
HARRISON: They have. When early voting started in mid October you had this surge of Democrats come out – they are angry at President Trump, they want to be heard. At that point, registered Republicans were under 20% of the voting pool.
So they have been adding market share, if you want to call it that.
But how many Republicans will turn out this week? Can registered Republicans reach, say, 27% of the early voting pool? Can they match their 2018 and 2022 numbers and break 30%?
That later number seems unlikely.
TERRY: So we have been talking a lot about Republicans. Let’s look at Democrats and unaffiliated voters.
Democrats are at just under 42% of the voting pool. That’s similar to where they were in 2022 and 2018.
But unaffiliateds are way, way up. And national and state polls this year have shown that unaffiliated, or independent voters, are favoring Democrats. Again, if you want a reason, look to the president’s unpopularity.
Veteran North Carolina Republican political strategist Paul Shumaker talked about the mood of these voters recently on Tim Boyum’s Tying it Together podcast:
SHUMAKER: Here’s what you need to understand with the non-idealogue unaffiliated voter. They do not like Donald Trump right now. A lot of that is not driven by policy. A lot of that is driven by leadership style, OK?
TERRY: Let’s switch gears and talk about actual races, starting with the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Roy Cooper and Republican Michael Whatley.
HARRISON: Polls have consistently shown Cooper with leads of 8 to 10 percentage points, and I don’t think there is anything in the early voting numbers to suggest that’s incorrect. So the former governor remains a heavy favorite.
The key will be other races, or storylines, on Tuesday.
TERRY: Like, Can the Democrats win control of the state House?
HARRISON: Political experts say it’s not out of the question, although no one believes the state Senate to go blue.
And there are other big races. Can Democrats win Congressional races in which Republicans have a built-in advantage in terms of party registration, like the 11th District in the mountains or the 1st District in the rural northeast and coast?
In that podcast interview, Shumaker said other Republican Congressional incumbents in what are considered very safe districts need to be worried, like Richard Hudson, David Rouzer and Tim Moore.
SHUMAKER: If Democrats make up 35% and Republicans make up 27% it’s going to be a bad night for a lot of people.
HARRISON: Then he compared it to wave midterm elections when Republicans did extremely well and Democrats suffered shocking defeats.
SHUMAKER: A lot of people don’t remember that in 1994 a guy named Tom Foley lost. He was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. His district wasn’t on anything.
HARRISON: So, let’s keep watching the next week of early voting numbers.
