NCSBE: As Democratic Party Registrations Shrink, Number of Republicans Grows in NC

RALEIGH – How this will effect the outcome of elections is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure: the popularity of the Democratic Party in North Carolina is falling, while the number of new voters registering as Republican is growing.

The effect is one of closing the gap between a historically imbalanced voter registration pie chart. Since 2016, according to the N.C. State Board of Elections, the number of registered Democrats in North Carolina has decreased by 128,787.

Republican voters, over the same period, have INCREASED by 108,000.

The changes haven’t occurred in a vacuum, of course, with new voters registering as ‘unaffiliated’ growing by 363,000 in a state with steady population growth.

Yet, in a swing state Donald Trump won by 173,315 votes, the net swing of nearly 227,000 voters away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party has got to be concerning for the Left.

And, of course, a third of registered voters being ‘unaffiliated’ doesn’t necessarily mean those voters are non-partisan. Most of them vote reliably Democrat or Republican, merely eschewing the party label on their registration. How the 2020 elections turn out will reveal  a lot about just how many of those ‘independent voters’ actually hold to the Left or stick to the Right.

Hopefully, we’ll get those answers sooner, rather than later. The election is just five days away, but the courts have ruled that absentee ballots can be accepted, as long as postmarked by election day, up to nine days after the November 3 election.