Unaffiliated voters are surging in NC. Who are they, and who will they pick in 2020?
North Carolina voters have proven to be enthusiastic about voting early this year, but it’s hard to say which party should be more excited about that fact.
That’s because it’s unaffiliated voters around the state, even more than Democrats or Republicans, who have been voting in greater numbers than ever before. And since they make up one in every three voters, it’s a guessing game which way North Carolina is leaning.
“We’re the swingiest of all swing states, and we will be for some time to come,” said veteran Republican strategist Paul Shumaker.
He said that’s in part because of the large number of relatively moderate unaffiliated voters here, who tend to “lean right of center on economic issues, left of center on social issues.”
That characteristic helps explain why in 2016, Republican Sen. Richard Burr won his reelection bid but Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost his, Shumaker said. McCrory was tied to HB2 — which required people in schools and other government buildings to use the bathroom matching the gender on their birth certificate — and Burr wasn’t.
But it’s not just social issues that will influence which party unaffiliated voters support, he said. Economic issues matter too. He pointed to how Democratic President Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008 but then lost here in 2012.
“Barack Obama over-performed with unaffiliated voters in 2008 because of the bad Bush economy, but then he under-performed (in 2012) because of his overreach on health care,” Shumaker said.
Unaffiliated voters keep growing
With a week left in the 2020 elections, The News & Observer reported Monday, all types of voters have been voting early or by mail more than they did in 2016. But while Democrats and Republicans were both at 104% of their 2016 early and mail-in voting numbers through Monday, unaffiliated voters were at 121%.
Libertarian voters, a much smaller group, increased even more, with 124%.
Rebecca Tippett, director of the Carolina Demography project at UNC-Chapel Hill, said it’s not surprising.
“There are significantly more Unaffiliated voters in (North Carolina) today than there were in 2016,” she wrote in an email.
Since 2016, the total number of voters here grew by about 6%, state records show. But unaffiliated voters grew by 14%. They already outnumber Republicans and are on track to surpass Democrats, too.
Tippett’s research found that in addition to skewing younger and whiter than the typical North Carolina voter, many unaffiliated voters — maybe even most — moved here from another state. New York and Virginia are at the top of the list, followed by New Jersey and Florida.
Shumaker said unaffiliated voters also tend to be wealthier than average and are more likely to have a college degree. In general, he said, they tend to be right-leaning moderates.
That’s more or less the same conclusion reached by William Busa, a scientist with a background in biotechnology whose EQV Analytics firm consults with Democratic politicians.
But he believes unaffiliated voters have started moving significantly to the left.
Busa said his research shows Republicans had a 20-point advantage among unaffiliated voters as recently as the 2014 midterms, but in 2016 that dropped to 16 points and in the 2018 midterms it dropped to 10 points— only half of what it had been just four years prior.
He expects Democrats to continue that trend this year, cutting Republicans’ advantage among unaffiliated voters to single digits.
‘These are abnormal times’
Busa puts unaffiliated voters into two categories: Those who are basically pure partisans and almost always support the same party despite not joining it, and those who are truly swing voters, comfortable switching back and forth between parties. Those swing voters, he said, are a small but important group.
By his calculations, there are around 200,000 unaffiliated swing voters statewide — just under 3% of the total voters but still enough to change the outcome of a close race — and that they used to lean to the right but seem to dislike Republican President Donald Trump, as evidenced by the 2018 “Blue Wave” election.
“In 2018, for the first time in recorded history, Democrats won the majority of swing voters,” Busa said. “Now, that was back in normal times. These are abnormal times, I think we can all agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if swing voters went 75% for Democrats this year.”
However, he said, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden can’t just rely on Democrats and unaffiliateds to beat Trump in North Carolina. He expects Biden also needs at least 50,000 Republicans to vote for him.
That’s approximately 2% of the state’s registered Republican voters.
“This is going to be an incredibly close squeaker of an election,” Busa said.
According to the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, which averages multiple public opinion polls, Biden has consistently had a small lead over Trump in North Carolina — but neither has over 50% support.
One other factor to watch, said Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer, is the age of the unaffiliated voters.
Around 30% of the unaffiliated voters casting ballots so far, he said, have been under the age of 40 — in other words, Millennials and Generation Z — who are “overwhelmingly Democratic” even if they don’t register as Democrats.
Bitzer said that out of the unaffiliated voters who have already voted and who also voted in the March primaries, public records show that around 70% chose to vote in the Democratic primary.
That’s not necessarily the home run that Democrats might imagine at first glance, he said. Many didn’t vote in the primary at all. And some who did vote Democratic in March are probably conservatives who picked the Democratic primary because there wasn’t a competitive Republican primary for president.
But it’s also hard to completely ignore such a lopsided number.
“If we were looking for tea leaves, I’d look at that one,” Bitzer said. “But with all the caveats.”
This story was originally published October 27, 2020 at 6:41 PM with the headline "Unaffiliated voters are surging in NC. Who are they, and who will they pick in 2020?."
