North Carolina Democrats say they have good news coming out of early vote tallies, especially among African-Americans — a key constituency that Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) needs to win a tight re-election race where polls show she just barely leads House Speaker Thom Tillis, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate.
Data passed along from the Democratic organization ForwardNC says that African-Americans make up 24 percent of all votes cast so far in the 2014 midterm cycle. That’s an increase of 6 percentage points from 2010, the last midterm election, when African-Americans made up 18 percent of those who voted so far with just six days before the election.
Democrats also believe they have a slight advantage among voters that did not cast a ballot in 2010. According to the data, obtained by TPM, 101,409 voters who were eligible to vote but didn’t vote in 2010 have already voted this time around. And of that roughly hundred thousand vote, 51,506 votes are Democrats.
ForwardNC compiled the turnout results by taking public daily voter data and running it against internal voter files.
One thing to keep in mind with these numbers is that there was another major election between 2010 and 2014 — the 2012 elections when, according to ForwardNC, voter turnout six days before the election was 29 percent of all the early votes cast. But that’s a bad comparison, given that it’s a year that includes a presidential race and where Barack Obama was on the ballot.
In response, Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer said those numbers sounded about right.
“If you look at early voting in 2012 black voters made up almost 30 percent of all the votes cast in North Carolina,” Bitzer, who specializes in elections, state politics, and southern politics, told TPM Thursday afternoon. “Now if you go back to 2010, which was a midterm year, that percentage is only 21 percent. So you’ve kind of got this range of 20 to 30 percent. This year, in terms of cast so far, they are right in the middle at 25 percent.”
Bitzer also passed along a chart based on public data compiled to compare turnout in 2010 compared to 2014.
Bitzer suspected that dissatisfaction with the state legislature as well as education policy (a topic that Hagan has relentlessly hit Tillis on) and North Carolina not expanding Medicaid through Obamacare are key motivating factors for this voting bloc.
“I think it’s partly the reaction and the anger to the state General Assembly and Thom Tillis as speaker is the embodiment of that anger,” Bitzer said. “The lack of Medicaid expansion, the issues of education, and the voting law changes.”
