Francis De Luca
As I said on October 31, 2008, all that was left was who had the better "ground game" to get their voters to the polls. The election is over and the winner is… Democrats!
Looking over the election results it is clear that the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign dominated the playing field in North Carolina.
While overall turnout among registered voters was only up a few percentage points to around 68%, the makeup of that number is what is important. Each percent of increased turnout translated to about 62,000 extra votes over the increase in overall registration growth which was up about 13% over the 2004 election.
The 62,000 is important because when we look at election results we see that it was not new voter growth alone that explains the election – it was the turnout.
Barack Obama tallied about 583,000 more votes than John Kerry did in 2004. John McCain tallied about 136,000 votes than George Bush received in 2004 but is still behind Obama. If every newly registered voter voted – that would explain the results. But that is not what happened.
Looking at an analysis of one-stop/early voting you can see that prior to Election Day Democrats had banked a sizable number of votes in the 2.6 million voters who voted early. The below percentages indicate what percentage of each group had voted. Not shown is that approximately 28% of African-Americans had voted.
County |
Total |
Dem |
Rep |
Una |
Total |
42% |
47% |
39% |
34% |
With only an additional 26% of the eligible voters showing up on Election Day, we can see that these percentages, while changing, clearly indicate the final makeup of the voting population as being heavily Democratic. Republicans did not get their voters out and the resulting losses at the top of the ticket resulted.
The good news for Republicans is that the tide did not sweep too far past the top in most cases. While Robin Hayes lost his congressional race and commissioner races in certain places were impacted, the races for the state legislature were only mildly impacted.
Republicans captured one open state senate seat and lost no races. In the state house Democrats captured two open Republican seats and Republicans returned the favor defeating two Democrat incumbents. Republicans should feel fortunate that the gerrymandered districts did not allow Democrats to take advantage of their turnout advantage this year.
If Republicans had come closer to equaling the Democratic turnout they would have won the presidential race, come closer and maybe won the governor's race and prevailed in a number of close legislative races around the state.
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