A new study says North Carolina has added more than a million voters to the registration rolls since 2008. But a large majority of them didn't pick a party label.
The advocacy group Democracy North Carolina says four out of every five new voters since 2008 has registered as unaffiliated or independent.
They also point out that many of the state's 2.02 million unaffiliated voters are relatively young. About half of them are under age 41.
Catawba College professor Michael Bitzer says this growing block will force both Democrats and Republicans to make some changes.
“That's going to pose some interesting dynamics for both political parties if they are registering unaffiliated,” says Bitzer. “How do these political parties get in touch and identify who their true core supporters are?”
The report adds that unaffiliated voters will outnumber Republicans by the end of this year – and they will continue to reduce the Democrats' once-dominant share of North Carolina's registered voters.
“What we do know from political science research is that most folks who identify as independent, if you push them, ask them a subsequent question, they will lean to one party or the other and often times their voting patterns are just like a strong partisan,” says Bitzer. “So yes, the unaffiliated voters are rising, they're matching where registered Republicans are by this report, but I wouldn't be surprised if these are masked partisans just not wanting the label attached to them.”
Bitzer says the new wave of millennial voters is something that both parties are watching closely in North Carolina. He says in the not too distant future, they're expected to be the largest cohort in the state's voter registration pool.
“What we know from national surveys of millennial voters, those under the age of 36, they tend to lean more Democrat than necessarily Republican, so the dynamics in North Carolina are going to continue to be this kind of toss back and forth political state, a very competitive political state in my estimation,” says Bitzer.
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