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Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz kicked off a canvassing event on Oct. 20 in Matthews, a suburban town in Mecklenburg County that’s 71% white and 52% college-educated.
Perhaps that location was just a coincidence.
But it’s arguably symbolic.
For Kamala Harris and Walz to win North Carolina, it appears they must rely more on independent, white, suburban voters than Barack Obama did in winning the state in 2008 and Joe Biden did in 2020 when he narrowly lost it.
In the 2008 election, 21.6% of the registered voters in North Carolina were Black. And once the voters were counted, 21.6% of the people who voted were Black, according to data from Catawba College professor Michael Bitzer.
African American voters turned out at a slightly higher rate than white voters that year, and that was enough to propel Obama to a narrow win — by just 14,000 votes.
In the 2020 election, 20.6% of registered voters in North Carolina were Black. But once the votes were counted, only 18.6% of the people who turned out were Black. Biden lost the state by almost 75,000 votes.
That downward trend is continuing in 2024.
This year, 19.7% of registered voters in North Carolina are Black. Based on early voting tallied Friday morning, only 17.5% of the people who have cast ballots are Black, according to the John Locke Foundation’s Vote Tracker. (The Black share of early votes at this point in 2020 was 19.6%.)
That is not a good sign for Democrats.
To be sure, the decline isn’t as steep as it appears.
The main reason the share of registered Black voters keeps declining is that more and more people aren’t listing their race or ethnicity when registering to vote. There were about 100,000 voters like that in 2008. Now there are 1 million voters listed as “other/undesignated.”
So it’s possible the actual share of Black registered voters isn’t really going down.
But what’s undeniable is that among the people who self-designate as Black, there is a turnout gap of around two percentage points. That’s held steady throughout all of the early, in-person voting period.
If that holds true through Election Day, that would equal a loss of about 80,000 votes for Harris.
She will need to make that up somewhere.
National polls suggest she’s doing better among college-educated voters than Biden. And lots of those people live in Matthews and nearby Union County.
Democrats hope abortion is a particularly motivating factor, pushing unaffiliated voters — both women and men — into their camp.
That was the hope in the 2022 U.S. Senate race, when Democrat Cheri Beasley, the first Black woman to run for Senate in North Carolina, struggled to get Black voters to the polls during early voting. (The Black electorate after early voting was 18.6% that year.)
The Beasley campaign needed unaffiliated women motivated by the Dobbs decision to carry it to victory. That didn’t happen.
Still a close race
Polling averages show Donald Trump with a small lead in North Carolina, though well within the margin of error.
At the same time, polls of early voters nationwide show Harris winning, including a small lead in North Carolina.
Donald Trump held a rally in Gastonia Saturday, bringing both presidential candidates to the Charlotte region within hours of each other.
Kamala Harris held a large rally in Mecklenburg County Saturday night, with musical guests such as Jon Bon Jovi and Khalid.
Here are other data points from early voting:
- There has been a lot of talk about a large gender gap in the early vote in swing states. That also exists in North Carolina, where 51.9% of all ballots have been cast by women and 41.4% by men. (The rest are undesignated.)
Having more women than men vote is good for Democrats.
But that gender gap was almost identical at this point in 2020, with 51.5% of early voters women and 40.9% by men.
Same goes for the 2022 election. After early voting that year, it was 52.3% women and 43% men.
- Mecklenburg County turnout continues to lag.
As of Friday morning, 49.6% of North Carolina voters had cast ballots.
In Mecklenburg, that number was 46.9%.
After Wednesday’s early voting, only one of the state’s 10 largest counties (Cumberland) had a lower turnout rate than Mecklenburg so far.
When early voting wrapped up Saturday, more than half of all registered voters had cast ballots. Turnout four years ago was 75%, which means that the election is essentially more than two-thirds finished.
