By the numbers
The folks at Democracy North Carolina put out this week a table that showed how many new voters registered in each county since the beginning of the year.(XLS)
The Democracy NC folks were making the case that with all the new voters registered, counties would have to be ready for an onslaught this election season and should be ready to make use of early voting. Guilford County already has a pretty robust early voting program, with more than a dozen locations available in the run-up to an election.
From a horse-race analysis perspective, the numbers are enough to raise an eyebrow. Of the 12,654 new voters since Jan. 1, 9,061 registered as Democrats and another 3,690 registered as unaffiliated. You can very well chalk up the positive movement there in part to the Obama campaign coming in and getting its voter registration folks on the ground.
But in the Republican column, the party actually had 106 fewer people registered as Republicans six months into the year than it started with in 2008. Were I running the party or a county-wide candidate, that would make me pretty unhappy.
I don't think that's enough to base any predictions on, but those kinds of trends would be useful to anyone trying to build an argument that Democrats are surging in Guilford while the Republicans are having to work to hold their ground. They would also be useful to any local or statewide GOP machinery trying to make the case that it was time for a big voter registration effort.
Overall, I'm not sure the new voter registration numbers should have anyone jumping out of their skin yet. New registrants, while big in numbers terms, are still only 3.7 percent of all voters in Guilford County. What we don't know about that 3.7 percent is whether they're more or less likely to vote, more or less likely to keep to a party line when they do vote or whether they'll vote for the top five offices on the ballot and stop or keep going.
Comments (2)
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Speaking of numbers, I was skeptical that 12,654 new voters represented only 3.7 % of all Guilford County voters, but you are correct. According to the Guilford County Board of Elections, there are 327,904 registered voters. Here's what puzzles me though, the total adult population of Guilford County is 344,351 (2006). Are 95% of adults registered to vote? Really?
Posted on July 24, 2008 11:24 AM
I would doubt very much that 95 percent of Guilford County's adult population is registered to vote. But I would bet that there are a lot of transient registrations (college students, temporary workers, etc...), recently dead people and other folks who are no longer eligible on the voters lists. This is a problem going on since the beginning of voter lists.
And it's not unreasonable to think a very high number of people are registered to vote since a pretty high number of people have drivers' licenses and they ask you to sign up to vote when you get your license.
Posted on July 24, 2008 3:46 PM