It is 29 days until election day on November 3. Here are some relevant upcoming dates from the North Carolina State Board of Elections:
- Oct. 9: Voter registration deadline
- Oct. 15: Early voting begins (same-day registration available)
- Oct. 20: Absentee ballot request deadline (5 p.m.).
- Oct. 31: In-person early voting ends (3 p.m.).
- Nov. 3: Election Day (Deadline for most absentee ballots)
Turnout is down almost 20% from the same point in the last midterm election
As seen on Vote Tracker, county boards of elections have accepted 11,632 ballots through September 27.
(NOTE: the graphic looks a little off because three ballots from the same county have mistaken dates of October 28. I have contacted the county board of elections, and they will correct the misdates in their next upload. I will post an updated graphic after they upload that corrected data on October 6, unless I forget.)
That is a 19.3 percent drop from a similar point in the last midterm election in 2022.
Why is turnout down so much?
It is possible that the drop represents general disgust with politics and a refusal by citizens to participate in the process.
A more likely explanation, however, is that voters are returning to in-person voting after voting absentee in 2020 during the COVID-19 scare and continuing to vote that way in 2022. An NBC poll found that the share of Democrats planning to vote by mail declined by a third, from 34 percent in 2024 to 23 percent. Republican intention to vote by mail remained low in the survey at 12 percent.
Fewer absentee votes do not necessarily mean less voting altogether. We could see the share of people voting early in person or on election day increase.
Data support the “Democrats-going-back-to-normal” hypothesis. The partisan breakdown of the accepted ballots is 45.7 percent Democratic, 37.9 percent unaffiliated, and 16.2 percent Republican. Those numbers are lower for Democrats than at a similar point in 2022, when the breakdown was 51.3 percent Democratic, 32.5 percent unaffiliated, and 16.0 percent Republican.
Compared with a similar point in 2022, the number of Democratic ballots dropped by 28.1 percent, unaffiliated ballots by 5.9 percent, and Republican ballots by 18.4 percent.
Forecast: An even bigger absentee ballot slowdown
The number of absentee ballot requests indicates that absentee voting will drop even further compared to 2022. Voters have requested 102,987 absentee ballots so far this year, compared to 154,091 four years ago, a 33.2 percent drop.
The Democratic share of absentee ballot requests has dropped by 7.0 percentage points, from 49.5 percent in 2022 to 42.0 percent in 2026. Again, however, that is likely due to a move away from absentee voting this year. That is an improvement from last week for Democrats, when their absentee ballot requests were 7.5 percentage points below their 2022 proportion.
Democrats were 44.2 percent of all absentee voters (not absentee ballot requesters) in 2022 and 41.3 percent in 2018.
Republicans are in a voter registration hole
Looking at voter registration starting 15 weeks before election day, Democrats are keeping up with their 2018 pace, with a net gain of a little over ten thousand registrations. In the meantime, Republicans are almost a ten thousand registrations behind where they were in their pre-election registration gains.
Democrats out gained Republicans by 1,892 registrations this week and are on pace to outnumber Republicans in North Carolina in by October 19. Republicans pulled ahead of Democrats for the first time last January.
Two caveats, as reported last week:
- Democrats tend to do well in registrations during election season and regularly, but not always, out gain Republicans in the weeks before election day.
- Republicans will almost certainly regain the top party spot during biennial list maintenance in January.
