How NC turnout affected election outcomes in 2024

Featured photo: Primary Election Day on March 5, 2024 (photo by Maaroupi Sani)

This story was originally published by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press
November 14, 2024

Every four years, candidates claim it’s the “most important election of our lifetimes.” They say they want high turnout, with people showing up to the polls and voting — for them, ideally. 

This year, not everyone seemed to be convinced, Andy Jackson said. 

Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation, was responding to the slightly lower turnout this year — 73.1 percent of registered North Carolina voters — compared to 2020’s record turnout of 75.4 percent. 

“I guess with everything that was going on that year in 2020, maybe 2020 was the most important election of our lives,” Jackson said. 

It was an “unusual year,” he said. People were stuck at home because of COVID, the Black Lives Matter movement got people politically engaged and there wasn’t much else to do but vote. 

In some ways, it’s “unfair” to compare 2020 turnout to 2024, Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper said. The 2020 election saw the state’s highest turnout in a century, and likely approaching the limit of what turnout could realistically reach. People were still engaged this cycle, even with a two percentage point drop, he said. 

“Turnout still looked robust by really any other comparison we could come up with,” Cooper said. 

Limited turnout data is available at this point, as official results continue to be tallied by counties ahead of the post-election canvass. Official voter history data won’t be updated for several weeks.

But in the meantime, exit polling data gives an initial impression of who showed up to the polls, who didn’t and why. 

Overall turnout dropped from 2020. Why? 

About 5.7 million North Carolinians weighed in on this year’s election, which amounted to about 100,000 more ballots than in 2020. But it’s a quickly growing state, so the turnout rate was slightly lower. 

At first, it seemed like it could be another record year for turnout. Based on preliminary data from the State Board of Elections, 74 percent of voters voted early this cycle, completely surpassing the previous record of 65 percent set in 2020. 

But absentee voting slowed from previous years, and Election Day voting wasn’t quite able to make up the difference. 

“Early voting is sort of becoming the standard of how people vote,” Appalachian State University political science professor Phillip Ardoin said. 

Ardoin always voted on Election Day until the past three cycles, when he realized the convenience of early voting worked for him. 

“Most people, once they do it once, they’re much more likely to do it again,” he said. 

Political parties have leaned into the early voting push, Ardoin added. That bore out in the data this year, with Republicans casting early votes as often as Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Previously, early voters were reliably Democratic. 

While overall turnout was comparable, Ardoin tied the slight decline to a drop in enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t the “transformative figure” for the Democratic Party that Donald Trump has been for the Republican Party, or that former President Barack Obama once was for Democrats. 

“If you even think about the day after the election, I think to the extent Democrats were upset with regards to the election outcomes, it was more that Trump won, as opposed to Kamala (Harris) didn’t win,” he said. 

Jackson agreed that there was a bit less excitement. 

“Voters are familiar with the cast of characters, at least at the presidential level,” he said. “I mean, Kamala Harris was new, but she was part of the administration.”

Voter also had less of a sense of urgency. While Democratic leaders tried to convey the threat Trump posed to democracy, it didn’t seem to loom as large as economic concerns for many voters. 

“Democrats or leaning Democrats weren’t as responsive to that because they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be another presidency with Trump and 2016 to 2020 wasn’t that horrible,’” Ardoin said. 

Who showed up and who didn’t?

While exact demographic data isn’t yet available, early and absentee voting data combined with exit polling data suggests that North Carolina voters were a little older, whiter and suburban this cycle than in 2020. 

Per usual, North Carolina voters split their tickets. They voted for Trump by three percentage points, while they overwhelmingly went for Democrat Josh Stein as the next governor. The 10 Council of State positions, which include roles like attorney general, superintendent of public instruction and agricultural commissioner, split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans picked up seats in the state’s congressional delegation, but that was due to map redrawing by the Republican legislature, not turnout. And Democrats narrowly defended one of the state’s most competitive congressional seats, of District 1 U.S. Rep. Don Davis.

Democrats made gains in the state House. While North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton may not have won North Carolina for Harris with her get out the vote campaign, Ardoin said, her efforts to set up opposed elections in nearly every district may have made a difference locally. 

Unaffiliated voters made up a greater portion of the electorate than in the past, while Democrats fell behind, according to exit polling data. In North Carolina, there are more registered unaffiliated voters than either of the main political parties, a relatively recent development in a state where Democrats and then Republicans each held the lead in the past. 

While unaffiliated voters tend to turn out less often than Democrats or Republicans, their ranks have grown so much over the past four years that the raw numbers are enough to give them outsize influence. It’s likely the new normal, which will make results even harder to predict, Jackson said. 

Cooper said he expects candidates and politicians to be more responsive to unaffiliated voters’ needs as their numbers continue to grow and they become more engaged, reliable voters.

This year, North Carolina unaffiliated voters were divided on a national level; 50 percent voted for Trump, while 48 percent voted for Harris, according to exit poll data. 

Older voters 65 and over made up over a quarter of the electorate this year, a slightly higher percentage than in 2020. The largest group was voters aged 45-64, and the smallest was voters under 30. 

Young voters generally don’t show up, unless it’s 2008 and Obama is on the ballot, Cooper said. 

“That’s not because young people don’t care about politics or they’re not engaged. They move more often. They’re less rooted in their communities,” he said. 

“Political parties and candidates have a harder time reaching them,” Cooper said. “So it’s these bigger structural reasons. It’s not that they don’t care, but you put all that together, and it means they tend to turn out less often.”

The biggest predictor of young voter turnout is whether America is directly engaged in war, Ardoin said. That’s not the case, and there wasn’t any other huge crisis or Obama-like candidate to bring them out, he said. If there was excitement around Harris, it was tempered by feelings of economic insecurity, he added. 

“Inflation hits young people at a really higher rate than perhaps other individuals, and they’re seeing that in their pocketbooks,” he said. “So to the extent that the economy impacted them, probably had an impact on their excitement for the Harris campaign or the continuation of the Biden presidency.” 

The 2008 election serves as a reminder of how young voters can be engaged, and how their votes can impact an election, Cooper said. It also tells a bigger story about Democratic turnout in North Carolina, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Obama in 2008. 

“It reminds us, I think, that what’s stopping the Democrats isn’t that there aren’t enough Democrats; it’s that Democrats don’t turn out to vote in as great numbers,” he said. 

Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, is a particular problem for Democrats, Cooper said. It’s “a nut they just cannot crack.” While it’s one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, turnout continued to be poor this cycle. 

Other urban areas faced similar, if less striking turnout issues. Urban voters dropped from 33 percent to 27 percent of the electorate between 2020 and 2024, while the suburban voter proportion of the electorate rose by 11 points and the rural electorate increased by five points.

Urban areas tend to be home to more Democratic, younger and less wealthy voters. How easy voting is, Ardoin said, makes a difference for these kinds of voters.

The racial breakdown of the electorate was similar to 2020, based on initial data, but with slightly more white voters and fewer voters of color. 

Jackson said that’s understandable, considering George Floyd’s death and the aftermath across the nation in 2020. 

“Maybe that was a motivator for Black voters that wasn’t around this time, even if you had a Black person at the top of the ticket,” he said. 

One question political scientists wonder about is whether the so-called diploma divide, the “idea that people who have college degrees are much more likely to vote Democratic and people who do not are much more likely to vote Republican,” will continue. 

Cooper thinks it has accelerated since 2016, when it first emerged. Ardoin wants to see the final breakdown of college graduate voting by gender to see if the divide sticks. 

Why did people show up?

Across the United States, the same issues appeared over and over again at the top of voters’ concerns: the economy, immigration, democracy and abortion. 

The first two heavily favored Trump, while the latter two favored Harris. 

In North Carolina, 37 percent of voters named the economy as their top issue. That’s normal — the economy is always the number one issue, but it’s complex. Cooper said. Each party’s job was to frame it in a way that benefitted them. 

“There’s a lens where this economy looks really good, and there’s a lens where this economy looks really bad, and the Republicans were more successful than the Democrats at getting people to adopt their lens,” he said. 

While North Carolina is not a border state, immigration ranked high in importance as well. 

“Politics has become very national,” Ardoin said. “(Former Democratic US Speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill used to have the old saying, ‘All politics is local,’ and I think that’s less true today than it ever has been in American politics.”

According to AP VoteCast, immigration was about six times as important to North Carolina voters this year as it was in 2020. 

“That has been an issue that particularly Republicans have been focused on for several years,” Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer said. “And when that becomes a level of salience or importance by one party, their voters are going to respond.”

Did anything keep people from voting? 

Several events could have stifled turnout in North Carolina. Most prominently, Tropical Storm Helene, which struck mere months before Election Day and required last-minute changed plans. 

But while the state braced for lower turnout in counties impacted by Helene, most ended up with higher turnout rates than the state average. 

“That’s a testament to the hard work of folk who are, like, at the local level, running elections, making things happen,” Democracy NC senior policy analyst Brian Kennedy said. 

By all accounts, the 2024 elections was “a pretty boring election” from an election administration perspective, Cooper said. 

“That’s the highest compliment you can give an election administrator,” he said. 

Election workers crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s, Ardoin said. Most county board of elections offices have gone “above and beyond” to ensure the voting process runs smoothly in response to increased pressure after 2020 election conspiracy theories and lies proliferated over the past four years, Ardoin said. 

Democracy NC runs a voter hot line program and voter protection program, Kennedy said. The most common issues this year were questions about the new voter ID requirement, voter registration and accessibility at the polls. 

Some issues occurred with general voter intimidation, like “confusing messages and misinformation around voting and immigration.” At some polling sites, signs popped up that told voters, in Spanish, that voting as a noncitizen was illegal, a felony and grounds for deportation. 

While this was true, some were concerned that the signs were unnecessary and attempts to intimidate naturalized citizens. 

The voter ID law and the removal of the three-day grace period for mail-in-ballots was a potential barrier to voting, as well as Helene and the two-week absentee ballot delay caused by the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the ballot, Brian Kennedy said. 

County board of elections funding may also have an impact on the ability to respond to voter concerns, he added. It’s difficult to quantify the impact of all these issues and laws on voter turnout, Kennedy said. 

“It’s a compounding situation,” he said. “I think that one of the things that is difficult around the type of voter suppression that we’ve seen is that it’s just really hard to put numbers to it. Really the impacts of these laws are that they discourage voters, and so it’s one small obstacle followed by another small obstacle.”

Turnout isn’t everything

In the months before Election Day, Trump, Harris and their vice presidential picks appeared in North Carolina dozens of times. 

Bitzer said as long as North Carolina’s voter turnout demographics matter on a national level, those candidates should and will continue to show up.

Harris’ visits probably helped her avoid a bigger loss, Cooper said. Maybe they helped some of the down-ballot Democratic candidates, too. 

But while get-out-the-vote efforts matter, they can only do so much, Ardoin said. The people at the rallies aren’t undecided, and there’s much less readership of local news covering the events in this day and age, he said. 

Turnout is only half of the equation, Jackson said. The other half is persuasion. For example, Trump may have gained some ground with Hispanic voters and Black male voters this year, and most North Carolina counties were more pro-Trump than they were in 2020. 

That kind of broad shift across demographics means just as much to a candidate as getting more members of a demographic group who will vote for them to show up, he said. It takes both pieces to win an election. 

“In the end, you’re kind of steering a ship against the tide if you’re trying to change people’s behavior,” Jackson said. “If folks are less interested in this election than they were four years ago, it’s going to just be harder for you to compel them to turn out.”