Early voting in the November election begins this week. Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in North Carolina for more than a century. But Republicans could soon outpace Democrats in registrations. Good news for the GOP, right? Well, maybe not quite.
Chris Cooper is a political science professor at Western Carolina University and wrote about the shift in party affiliations in North Carolina for the Assembly. He joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: You write that part of what’s happening in North Carolina is that already-registered voters are switching from Democrat or Republican to unaffiliated, but that most of this change is happening because of a generational shift. That is younger voters are increasingly choosing to go unaffiliated. So what's driving these trends?
Chris Cooper: Essentially, this is folks at the later end of the lifespan who exit the electorate and exit this mortal plane. They are replaced, obviously, with newer voters. The folks that are much older are overwhelmingly Democratic, and the folks who are coming in are overwhelmingly unaffiliated. So, as you see, these Democrats literally die off and the unaffiliateds come in, that's what's leading to the lion's share of this change.
Why is it happening? It's really a few things. Part of it's certainly cultural and young people's desire to not get tagged to a party and not really want to join groups in general. But another reason is that the institutional features of North Carolina say that if you're unaffiliated, you can choose the Democratic primary or the Republican primary. Many other states don't allow that possibility. They sort of lock you in; if you are unaffiliated, you are not allowed to vote in a primary at all. And so we see in North Carolina, historically, the unaffiliated numbers began to creep up at exactly the moment that we started to open up our primaries.
Terry: Is there any push to once again close primaries in North Carolina?
Cooper: Quite the opposite. The North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill last session that makes it so that can't happen. They said these unaffiliated folks need to be allowed to participate in either party primary that they want to, so we're actually seeing the opposite push.
Terry: Is this trend of more unaffiliated voters playing out in other states?
Cooper: It is playing out in other states. We see it particularly in places that have open primaries, and it is happening particularly again among young people.
Terry: There’s talk right now about the Democratic Party experiencing a registration crisis. President Trump has even been posting on Truth Social registration numbers showing Republican gains in states, including in North Carolina. How much of this shift to unaffiliated is part of that?
Cooper: That is really the lion's share of what we're seeing is the shift to unaffiliated. Yes, the Democrats are in decline. Yes, that is a problem for the Democrats. President Trump is right. The New York Times wrote a big piece about this, and they're correct; those numbers are happening and real, and this trend is absolutely borne out in the data.
But what they sort of assume is that must mean the Republicans are doing better, right? But what we're seeing is the opposite. So if you grab 1988, for example, Republicans made up about 30% of the electorate in North Carolina in 1988. Today, Republicans make up about 30% of the electorate in the state of North Carolina. So the Democrats are declining, the unaffiliateds are rising, and the Republicans are sort of steady Eddie for the last few decades.
Terry: So, in the en,d how much do you think this matters for North Carolina elections, like the Senate race next year? Will unaffiliated voters continue to break along traditional party lines, or does this signal a real long-term realignment?
Cooper: Maybe a little bit of both. A lot of these unaffiliated voters, what we call shadow partisans, they're going to vote with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the vast majority of the time. But some of them do swing, and so the simplest way I like to think about it is most unaffiliated voters are not swing voters, but most swing voters are unaffiliated voters. And so that's going to be the short-term challenge for the parties, is to identify those voters to turn them out, but not to turn out the wrong ones for each party. In the long run for our state, though, I think we have a real sort of ticking time bomb on our hands.
We still know that you essentially have to be a member of one of the two major parties to win elected office in our state, but yet young people are overwhelmingly opting out of the system. The question we should all be asking is who's going to be left to run for office in 10, 20, or 30 years?
