More noodling with numbers: How Republicans get shellacked in North Carolina

Ok. I can’t stop trying to figure out what is going to happen in this election. I’ve been using both vote trackers from Carolina Forward and the John Locke Foundation. I’ve also been looking at recent polling that’s coming in. Everything points to a banner year for Democrats.

Right now, Democrats are outpacing their Republican opponents by a wider margin than either 2022 or 2018. Through yesterday, Democrats have a 313,000 voter advantage over Republicans. In comparison, at this point in the early vote in 2018, Democrats led Republicans by about 200,000 early voters. In 2022, the number was around 124,000.

The unaffiliated voters are also showing up in unprecedented numbers. So far, 744,740 unaffiliated voters have voted compared to 421,300 in 2018 and 489,606 in 2022. I’m pretty certain those unaffiliated voters are breaking for Democrats by a wide margin.

The next three days will determine the size of the Democrats’ margin heading into Election Day. In both 2022 and 2018, early voting spiked during the final days of the period. If Democratic turnout slows down, Republicans might be able to staunch the bleeding, but if it continues on pace, Democrats will go into Election Day with an almost insurmountable lead.

Republicans will most likely turn out at around 58% overall since that’s what they’ve done in both 2018 and 2022, and they seem on pace to repeat it this year. Over the next three days, they will probably add 187,000 or so voters. Their early vote total will likely be around 730,000 voters. They will dominate Election Day.

If Democrats add voters at the same pace they did in 2022, they would add another 284,000 or so voters, but that’s not likely. Instead, they will add a low of about 206,000 more voters, the average of 2018 and 2022, and most likely somewhere between 250,000 and 270,000. They will probably end early voting with between 1,050,000 and 1,130,000 voters.

The unaffiliated voters are the wildcard. They now make up about 40% of the registered voters. They turn out at a lower rate than voters registered with a party, but their impact is significant. How they break determines elections.

So far, 744,740 unaffiliated voters have voted. They are on pace to add another 260,000 or so voters. At that rate, they will have around 1 million at the end of the early voting period.

If my scenario is right, Democrats will lead Republicans by more than 300,000 votes heading into Election Day. If unaffiliated voters break for Democrats by 13 points, like Gary Pearce’s poll of unaffiliated voters suggests, Democrats will have a lead of around 500,000 votes.

After early voting, Republicans will likely have voted about half of their voters. In 2018, their Election Day vote made up 49% of their total, and in 2022 it made up 48%. In 2022, Republicans had about a 177,000-vote advantage over Democrats on Election Day. In 2018, that margin was about 16,000 voters.

To offset the margin that Democrats likely hold going into Election Day, Republicans would need to have a record surge of between 950,000 and 1 million voters. And that’s assuming that late-breaking unaffiliated voters are more conservative and split their votes between Republicans and Democrats. In other words, GOP total turnout would need to be around 73%.

And that’s why Republicans are about to lose big. They are not going to turn out at presidential levels on Election Day this year. They might cut the margin some, but Democrats are poised to win by large margins, maybe enough to sweep some people into office.

All of this is speculation based on past turnout projections. I could be way off. Unaffiliated voters may not be heavily supporting Democrats. Democratic turnout could drop dramatically over the last three days of early vote and drop even more on Election Day. But I don’t think so.

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