GOP Registration Rises in State
In rural areas of the state, Republican registration has gone up dramatically.
By Cash Michaels –
The Harris-Walz campaign is helping increase NC Democratic registration as well.
County boards of elections don’t begin mailing out absentee ballots to eligible voters in North Carolina until Sept. 6, and in-person early voting doesn’t begin until Oct. 11, so there are no ballots cast as of yet. But if recent voter registration numbers for both Democrats and Republicans across the state are any indication, the November 5th general election may see one of the largest voter turnouts in recent election years.
As of August 10, 2024, there were 2,402,172 Democrats (31.9%), 2,269,714 Republicans (30.2%), and 2,849,518 (37.9%) unaffiliated voters in North Carolina.
Racially, there are 4,898,445 white voters; 1,509,362 Black voters; 664,272 undesignated; and 308,345 Hispanics. “Undesignated” comprises voters who did not identify a race or cultural heritage (e.g., API, or American-Pacific Islander) on their registration forms.
Women registered to vote substantially outnumber men across the state, 3,771,174 (54%) to 3,213,340 (46%).
Registration Climbing
Recent reporting shows that in the rural areas of the state, Republican registration has gone up dramatically. For example, even though there are more registered Robeson County Democrats than there are Republicans, GOP voter registration over the past 20 years shows an uptick of 94%, from 7,274 in December 2004 to 14,111 by July 27, 2024, according to WRAL-TV.
Meanwhile, Democratic voter registrations went down 40%, and unaffiliated registrations went up a whopping 327% from 5,942 to 25,367.
WRAL tracked voter registration figures in 25 North Carolina counties and found the same trend occurring as in Robeson County, which is a 60% majority-minority county; that is, two minorities, Blacks and Native Americans, make up three-fifths of the population.
The TV station found urban counties, however, like Durham, Wake and Orange, displaying the opposite trend, with their number of Democratic registrations growing.
According to Chris Cooper, the Madison Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University, “From July 20 through July 26, 2,351 people registered as Democrats in North Carolina—a 44% increase compared to the previous week. New Republican and Unaffiliated voters, on the other hand, were both down from the previous week (-23% and -14% respectively).”
Prof. Cooper continues, “While this is good news for Democrats, we should not lose track of the larger story line: Democrats are losing in terms of voter registration, and a Harris effect of this size, even if it is sustainable, would not be enough to arrest the larger trends in party registration. As Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation notes, the available evidence indicates that Republicans will do better than Democrats during both the 2024 registration rise and the 2025 registration fall, leading them to overtake Democrats sometimes in 2025 or 2026.”
Still, given the stakes of the November 5th general election in less than 90 days, most observers are counting on a Democratic explosion of voter registration, especially in North Carolina’s African American community, to win the state for VP Harris and down ballot state wide races.
Voter registration ends in North Carolina on Oct. 11, 2024 at 5 p.m. (with the exception of early voting – same-day registration).
