Figures below are through Sunday October 20th, from the NC State Board of Elections (NCSBE)
Late Monday, officials in Wake County, home of the capital city of Raleigh, the state’s second-largest, told reporters that
“more than 96,000 residents cast ballots (in Wake/Raleigh) through Sunday. Breaking it down, registered Democrats had a nearly 2-to-1 edge over Republicans, with unaffiliated voters closely trailing Democrats.
Looking back: Statewide, the Thursday Oct. 17 2024 tally = 353,166 ballots were accepted at several hundred sites (preliminary NCSBE data). The previous record for first day voting was 348,559, set in 2020.
Interpreting the meaning of the current voting rush as far as election results is still a matter of guesswork.
“The really key thing to me is the generational gap,” said Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College. “There is a significant overperformance among boomer voters and a very pronounced underperformance of millennials and Gen Z voters.”
A report from Pew Research found that Democrats held a 32-point advantage with voters younger than 30 years old, and an edge with voters younger than 50, while voters 50 and older favored Republicans. It’s an age group that Democrats have worked to engage with, including last week at Soar to the Polls, which is labeled a nonpartisan event at NC Central, where Durham Mayor Leo Williams, a Democrat, and North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton attended.
“We’ve started here earlier than ever before, creating a student engagement program since very early in the summer, hiring early, identifying student leaders early, and sending our top people to talk to these students and meet them where they are early. It’s paying dividends,” said David Berrios, Campaign Manager of the North Carolina Coordinated Campaign for Harris for President.
The party highlighted nearly 100 paid staff on college campuses and noted it held events this past weekend at NC State, UNC Chapel-Hill, North Carolina A&T, and Johnson C. Smith University.
Another factor is the effects of Hurricane Helene.
“We’re seeing a slight lower rate of voters in the 25 (affected) counties, but there’s variations within those 25 counties, most notably Buncombe County has had a fairly slow lagged time in comparison to some of the other counties that were included in the designation. I think we’ll have to kind of watch and see how that plays out.
Do some of these counties catch up? Does Buncombe County get back into seeing regular numbers, if not exceeding numbers over this this week?”
In the state’s most populous city of Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, voting was heavy, but not record-breaking. The Charlotte Observer reported that:
Mecklenburg County voters cast 29,688 ballots Thursday, short of breaking the single-day early vote record of 35,195 set in 2020. But that figure was up from 3,747 votes on the first day every early voting site was open during the 2023 general election and 10,971 votes on the first day of early voting in October 2022, according to county data.
The Democrat-heavy county is known for lackluster turnout compared to other parts of the state — something party activists hope to address this year to help boost their candidate locally and statewide.
“Four days tells us a little bit, but not a full set of dynamics to really kind of read anything deep into these numbers at this point,” said Catawba’s Bitzer.
Recent polls continue to suggest a very tight race. Meantime, Republican Donald Trump made several stops in North Carolina Monday.
Early voting continues until November 2nd.