Election-Campaign Law

More on those NC early voting trends

By Charles Stewart III

The North Carolina Board of Elections has perhaps the most extensive election data available for download on the web. There is no better example of this than the voter files posted that report who has already voted in that state. James Hicks at the Early Voting Information Center has posted some informative graphs detailing the partisan leanings of the early voters in that state. You can see those here.

Even though downloading and using the data isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s hard to resist a data file with almost a million observations about actual voter behavior.

First, the most striking thing about early voting in North Carolina is that the partisan composition of the different early voting modes is striking, as the following table shows.

Both the civilian absentee and one-stop voters are more partisan than the military and overseas absentees. But, most striking is that the one-stop voters are dramatically more Democratic than the absentee voters, of any type.

There has been speculation about the role of young voters in this election, which we can get some insight into by examining the registration tendencies of different age groups, according to the method they have used to vote thus far. These data are summarized in the graph you can retrieve by clicking on the following link.

The graph shows this: 

First, ignore the colorful circles. The top (red) graph reports the percentage of different age groups that are registered as Democrats, among those who have voted early, using the ?one stop? provision. (In this graph, I have removed the unaffiliated voters, to concentrate on the partisan aspect of these turnout figures.) The middle (blue) graph reports the same for absentee voters who are voting from outside the state. The bottom (orange) graph reports the Democratic registration rates for absentee voters voting from inside North Carolina.

About the circles: the size of the circles indicates how many voters are in each category. The bigger the circle, the more voters. So, we see that the bulk of one-stop voters are middle-aged, the bulk of out-of-state absentee voters are young, and that inside-NC absentee voters are almost mostly middle-aged, with a bit of an increase among the college-aged crowd.

The middle graph is the most interesting to me. The first four circles are the college-aged voters. They are the least Democratic of the out-of-state absentee voters. By a small (but consistent) margin, the freshmen are the most Democratic of this group, followed by the sophomores, then the juniors, and then the seniors. There is this interesting jump up to the 22-year-olds, which starts a trend that continues to the 28-year-olds, when a gradual decline in Democratic leanings goes to the end. North Carolina students who go away to college appear to be less Democratic than other Tarheels who are out-of-state this election season. But, the more interesting trend among young out-of-staters is the bulge in Democratic registrations among those who are away, starting their careers.

Absentee voters within the state exhibit a U-shaped relationship between age and their partisanship. The youngest in-state absentee voters are very Democratic, as are the oldest voters.

More on the details as I have time.

Full post as published by Election Updates on October 24, 2008 (boomark / email).