Michael Bitzer

With the word last week that the Romney campaign was feeling “confident enough about North Carolina … to shift staff out of the state” on the same day as in-person early voting started, it might be wise for them to consider some past history and the first couple of days worth of early voting.

With the word last week that the Romney campaign was feeling “confident enough about North Carolina … to shift staff out of the state” on the same day as in-person early voting started, it might be wise for them to consider some past history and the first couple of days worth of early voting.

With in-person early voting underway in North Carolina, it might be helpful to break down its use in different areas of the state.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state has eight urban counties and 20 suburban counties that make up eight metropolitan areas. The other 72 counties are classified as rural counties.

Within the eight urban counties, 59 percent of the ballots cast were before Election Day, while suburban and rural counties each had 53 percent of their ballots cast during the early voting period.

We’ve had two debates for the chief executive for both the nation and the state, and while the Democratic candidates came out swinging in both, it was the president who obviously got his mojo back, and the lieutenant governor trying to make anything stick. 

Since the widely-panned performance at the first debate, the need to stem the bleeding by President Obama — particularly among his own party faithful — built up a level of expectations that could have rivaled the level Mitt Romney faced going into the first confrontation.

With all the attention on the presidential and gubernatorial contests in North Carolina, you’d think there’s only one or two shows in town for this year’s election —but there are many other elections that will appear on voters’ ballots this fall.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be covering different races that are trying to command the electorate’s attention.  First, we’ll start with North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts.

In a recent posting at NBC Latino, Dr. Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto noted that she during her time in the North Carolina, she came to find a growing and vibrant Hispanic/Latino community.

And in a recent opinion piece, she believes that “the importance of Latinos is just as big in the smaller state of North Carolina” as it is in traditional Latino swing states such as Nevada or Florida.

It was a two-for debate night, with the candidates for chief executive of North Carolina and the nation having their first televised debates. Both debates were much more than the stereotyped “talking points” forums. They were both substantive, in general, and certainly set a tone for the final month of the general campaign.

In the previous post, I compared the past two presidential elections against one another in a variety of different areas, most notably in the composition of voters casting ballots in North Carolina. 

Registered Democrats saw a significant increase (364,735) in their ballot numbers between 2004 and 2008, rising 22 percent, while registered Republicans saw a 9 percent increase in their voters casting ballots (120,896).

There are different ways of looking at the possible electorate, based on past presidential elections. For example, North Carolina’s electorate might be reflective of the composition of registered voters in the state.

So let’s start with the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won the state by 13 percent—and was a continuation of what North Carolina had traditionally voted at the presidential level. As was evident in previous elections, North Carolina was a state where the Republicans won by double-digits over a series of elections, and was classified as “safe” GOP state.

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement, and that government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49 -- he starts off with a huge number.