After five days of in-person early voting in North Carolina, two trends are emerging: One is that Republicans are embracing early voting more than they have in the past. The second is that fewer Black voters have voted early, in-person compared with this time four years ago.
At this point in the Joe Biden/Donald Trump race in 2020, 281,000 Black Democrats in North Carolinia had cast ballots in early, in-person voting.
This year, after five days of early in-person voting, only a little more than 206,000 have — roughly a 27% drop. That’s according to information from the John Locke Foundation’s Vote Tracker.
There are still 12 days of early voting left, including one Sunday. That’s a day Democrats call "Souls to the Polls," which is historically a big day for African American early voting organized by church groups. There’s also Election Day.
But Democratic political consultant Thomas Mills is worried.
“There’s time for Democrats to fix that,” he said. “But it needs to happen pretty quickly. They can’t really continue to hemorrhage votes among the Black community and hope to stay competitive.”
The 2020 early voting period was jumbled because of COVID-19, and the 2024 early voting period is being scrambled as GOP voters are behaving more like Democrats and voting early. Looking at who has voted early in 2024 and comparing it to 2020 is tricky because the pandemic upended how people voted. A large number of people — mostly Democrats — voted by mail.
For this year’s election, Trump has encouraged Republicans to vote early. Many are doing that, even after years of Trump railing against mail voting as fraud-ridden.
Tom Bonier with the election consulting firm TargetSmart said it’s very difficult to make comparisons to 2020.
His group estimates that at this point in the 2020 election, Black voters made up 24% of the electorate. As more Republicans voted on Election Day, that fell to 20.2% in the final results.
Trump won the state by 74,000 votes, or a little more than 1%.
This year he estimates Black voters are 19.5% of the people who have voted so far. At this point in the 2022 U.S. Senate election, they were 19.2% of the people who had already voted. Republican Ted Budd won the Senate race two years ago by a little more than 3%.
(The official statistics from the N.C. Board of Elections shows that Black voters are 18.6% of the people who have voted. TargetSmart has a higher number because it uses consumer data to identify the race of people who don’t fill it out when registering.)
Election nerves
Despite the uncertainty over comparing the 2020 and 2024 elections, some Black Democrats are looking nervously at the early reports.
“The numbers are down,” said Jocelyn Nolley, the chair of the Black Political Caucus of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. “And don’t get me wrong, we are very concerned (about the numbers) from last week.”
Turnout in Mecklenburg County is so far below the state average — a historical trend the county party has been working hard to reverse.
She said some of the slow start may be attributed to homecoming weekends at Johnson C. Smith University and North Carolina A&T.
Her organization this year is texting Black men, who are also a target of the Trump campaign.
National polls have shown Vice President Kamala Harris struggling to raise the same level of support among Black and Latino voters that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden had.
“I am nervous,” she said. “It’s a very close race. We are doing anything that sticks to get the Black vote out.”
The Harris campaign said its counting on partnerships with churches and campus voting drives to increase Black turnout.
“We have always known this would be a close race, but we’ve built an operation to reach voters in every corner of N.C.,” a campaign official said.
Republicans 'bank' votes
On the Republicans side, the GOP has been pushing its “Bank Your Vote program,” encouraging its supporters to cast ballots early.
But it’s hard for Donald Trump to stay on message about getting people to vote early. In the past, he has said without evidence there was fraud in mail voting in the 2020 election.
At a Pennsylvania rally last month, he called early voting “stupid.”
He then veered back to the official party line.
“Go out and make a plan to vote early, vote absentee, or vote in person on election day, but you gotta get out and vote,” he told his supporters.
So far, North Carolina Republicans have done that.
They are tied with Democrats in terms of how many of their supporters have already voted, with both at 20%.
Jason Williams with the Faith and Freedom Coalition said Republicans are responding to the message that early voting helps the GOP strategically.
“If you get out early we’ll be able to use the resources to target low to mid-propensity voters who haven’t voted yet, and I think people are buying that,” he said.
Williams acknowledges, however, that having more Republicans vote early may only cannibalize their vote on Election Day.
Here is the breakdown of how people have voted so far, comparing the 2020 and 2024 elections at the same point:
- Black Democrats by mail 2020: 89,322
- Black Democrats by mail 2024: 6,953
- Black Democrats early, in-person 2020: 281,000
- Black Democrats early, in-person 2024: 207,000
- White Democrats by mail 2020: 195,905
- White Democrats by mail 2024: 23,967
- White Democrats early, in-person 2020: 193,837
- White Democrats early, in-person 2024: 199,843
- Republicans by mail 2020: 122,247
- Republicans by mail 2024: 27,628
- Republicans early, in-person 2020: 373,389
- Republicans early, in-person 2024: 436,270
