Let's take a look at the turnout data so far in North Carolina, where counties worth one-third of the electorate have now updated their vote history data
These counties lean a little bit left, with a disproportionate chunk of the white liberal vote (Wake, Buncombe, Durham all in). So I think these numbers could be rosier than the final tallies for Democrats statewide, but I think the patterns will largely hold up
Let's start with party registration.
In these counties, 77% of Democrats turned out v. 82% of GOP. That's a 7 pt increase over 2016 in both cases.
As a result, the electorate by party reg in these counties is D+5.8, v. D+7.4 among all registered voters.
As I mentioned, I think it's possible that it doesn't wind up quite that good for Democrats in the end. But if we do suppose for a second that these turnout rates hold statewide, then you get a D+3.5 electorate v. D+5.3 registration.
By race, we have a story fairly similar to Georgia.
Over all, 79.4% of white registered voters turned out v. 69.5% of Black voters.
That's a 7 pt. increase in white turnout rate, and a 4 pt increase in black turnout
On all of these turnout rate statistics, the denominator is the registered voter population. And as in Georgia, the black share of registered voters has declined since 2016, so the decline in the black share of the electorate is greater than these turnout rates suggest
In these counties, Black voters made up 17.7 percent of the electorate v. 19.4 percent of registered voters.
In 2016, Black voters were 19.9% of the electorate and 21.4% of registered voters
Another similarity to Georgia is that there are a growing number of 'unknown' race voters, who now represent 10% of RVs in these counties. We don't know about their actual racial composition, but if many are Black then the decline in the Black share could be a bit overstated
One thing we can do in NC that we can't do in GA is look at age. We can't look at age in GA because I don't have a totally final voter file there, and I'm worried that would bias our findings against late registrants, who are disproportionately young.
The NC data in these counties shows no increase in the youth share of the electorate.
18 to 25 year old voters represent 9.4 percent of the electorate, the exact same as in 2016.
The turnout rate *among* 18 to 25 year old registrants, however, went up from 53.9 to 60.3 percent.
But the youth share of registrants went down, so there's no increase in the youth share of the electorate, whether as a consequence of coronavirus or an aging population
The only age group with an increase in its share of the electorate? Voters over age 65. They represented 23.7 percent of the electorate in these counties, v. 20.8 percent of the electorate in 2016.
I'd guess the aging population is a big factor here
So stepping back: in these counties, we have an older electorate, the black share of the electorate dipped, and no increase in Democratic turnout v. Republican turnout.
But Biden gained a net-3.5 points over Clinton in these counties, more than the state/nationwide
The above average swing toward Biden does raise the possibility that the turnout data will be even worse for him elsewhere, though it may just reflect more 'persuasion.' It'll be interesting to revisit this when more of the data is in.
I should add that I think it's genuinely surprising that the turnout increased so much without increasing the young/black/dem share of the electorate
Nonvoters in 16 were disproportionately young/black/dem. But higher turnout just drew another disproportionately old/white/rep set
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One thing that's fairly unique about election analysis--and that rubs people the wrong way, I think--is the emphasis on the components of change from one election to the next
Take a football game. If a few weeks ago, Seattle loses to football game, 42-35, and then a few weeks later, Seattle beats the same team 35-28, with Wilson throwing 5 TDs, the headline is probably about Wilson throwing 5 TDs and the offense winning them the game
In electoral analysis, that's definitely not how we'd cover it. We'd say that the Seattle defense made huge strides and/or that the opponent's offense fared worse. Wilson would almost be taken as a given
One election looms over the Georgia runoff: the 2008 runoff, when the GOP won a runoff election by 15 points after leading by just 3 points on Election Day.
I really don't think this should, well, loom over our analysis
For starters, some of the mythologizing about the 2008 runoff is wrong. Many analysts have blamed a precipitous decline in black turnout, but I don't think that's what happened
By my estimate (since for whatever reason the GA SOS didn't publish it, as they usually do), the Black share of the electorate in the GA special was 27.7 percent Black--it was down a bit from the general (29.9 IIRC), but still quite healthy (and indeed, higher than 2020!)
As an initial definitional question, we do have to define what we're calling the 'suburbs' here--and for simplicity I'm basically going to include the whole Democratic-trending part of the Atlanta area, including all of DeKalb and Fulton Counties--even though it includes Atlanta
There are plenty of suburbs in DeKalb and Fulton, and Biden made huge gains there. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to exclude Atlanta-proper from the historical data. But we can go back at the end and take out DeKalb and Fulton and see if it's a different story
A few people have asked about some other demographic groups in Georgia, namely young and other nonwhite groups. For some arcane reasons, it's a little more complicated to think about those groups--but let's go into it
The age problem is induced on our end: we do not have the final Georgia SOS voter file from before the election (though we've had a request in).
This doesn't make a material difference on race, based on public state figures. It might on age, given that late registrants are young
If we did go down the road of analyzing age, based on this data, I'm fairly confident it would be at least a little biased against youth turnout, and potentially meaningfully for the way the story is written. So we're just going to wait and see on that one
How Georgia turned blue: Huge gains in the Atlanta suburbs make up for a decline in the Black share of the electorate nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Georgia is the first state where we have fully updated vote history data, and it shows the Black share of the electorate falling to its lowest level since 2006
Biden compensated with huge gains in affluent and well-educated precincts
A few random thoughts this morning on what Democrats should take from the election results, as the recriminations and so on begin
1) Democrats shouldn't blame themselves for *quite* so much!
This election was about Trump. He was the incumbent. It was a referendum on him, and everyone knew it. If the GOP did better, it's mainly because Trump was stronger than understood--not simply because Dems blew it
Or put differently: I'm not really sure there was much Democrats could do about what happened here. Trump completely dominated American life for the last four years, people knew what they thought of it, and it's hard to believe there were magic words to undo it