RALEIGH – I’m about to write some counterintuitive things about voter turnout, so let me start off by granting the obvious: the 2008 North Carolina primaries produced a huge surge in voter participation.
Nearly 1.6 million North Carolinians cast ballots in the Obama-Clinton presidential primary. About 1.5 million voted in the Democratic primary for governor. More than a half a million Republicans and independents voted in the GOP primary for governor. These all represent large increases from the state’s baseline numbers. In 2000, for example, Mike Easley beat Dennis Wicker in a Democratic primary that attracted only 38 percent of the votes cast in the governor’s race this year. In 2004, Patrick Ballantine defeated Richard Vinroot in a spirited, highly competitive Republican primary that nevertheless drew 72 percent of the votes cast in the 2008 contest.
Overall, the 2008 primary turnout was 36 percent of registered voters. The average for the past five presidential-year primaries in North Carolina was 23 percent.
However, I think it is premature to assume that the 2008 primaries necessarily predict an unprecedented turnout in November. On the Democratic side, the primary-turnout surge was overwhelmingly an Obama-Clinton event. North Carolina is usually irrelevant in presidential politics, given its late primary date and GOP proclivities in the fall. There are many voters of all persuasions in North Carolina who care little about state and local races. We may not like it, but it’s true. They don’t read their local newspapers, they get most of their political news from national broadcast networks or the Internet, and as a result they are more familiar with national political figures than they are state ones (over the years, polling consistently showed that around a fifth of North Carolina voters thought Jim Hunt and Mike Easley were Republicans and about as many wrongly thought Republicans controlled the state legislature as correctly said Democrats did).
In 2008, these voters had more reason to vote in the primaries than ever before. That doesn’t mean they are truly new to the process – they just tend to skip May and vote in November. This year, they didn’t skip May.
But what about the massive increase in voter registration? Well, let’s put the numbers in context. From 2000 to 2004, the number of registered North Carolina voters rose 8 percent to 5.5 million. By last week’s primary, the number of registered North Carolina voters was 5.8 million, or 5 percent higher than in 2004. That is, of course, not an apples-to-apples comparison, because presumably state population growth and campaign organizations will continue to boost registrations until November. From primary-day 2004 to primary-day 2008, there was a more-impressive 12 percent increase in registrations.
Again, however, the question must be asked: Did the fascinating Obama-Clinton race truly expand the universe of registered voters by such a proportion, or did it mostly shift the timing of registrations that would have happened anyway? There’s no clear answer to this question at the moment, but I think it unlikely that registrations will continue to grow as rapidly from now until November as they did in advance of the primary.
Consider the example of the last time there were open presidential and gubernatorial races, the 2000 cycle. North Carolina actually experienced a 20 percent jump in registered voters that year over 1996. The vast majority of that increase, 15 percentage points, occurred ahead of the 2000 primary. (Indeed, back to the apples-to-apples approach for a moment, the increase was 22 percent from primary-day 1996 to primary-day 2000.)
If the 2008 cycle follows a similar pattern, then, we might expect voter registration by November to grow another 95,000, to about 5.9 million. That’s a lot of potential voters. But it would represent a lower rate of registration growth from 2004 to 2008 (nearly 7 percent) than in the recent past (an average of 12 percent growth in the past six four-year cycles going back to 1980). Perhaps 2008 won’t be like 2000. Perhaps registrations will continue at a brisk pace, fueled by Obamania or the mesmerizing labor-commissioner’s race. The per-month growth rate would have to quicken quite a lot, though, to reach that 12 percent historical average, which would translate to 370,000 additional registrations between now and November. Does that sound likely?
This year’s registration trend may not be as impressive as widely believed, but we’re still left with the unmistakable surge in actual voting in 2008 vs. previous cycles. Some think it means we’ll see a similar surge in voter participation in the fall. Color me skeptical. I know this is chicken-and-egg territory, but unless Barack Obama truly looks like a competitive threat to John McCain in North Carolina, I suspect that some of the new voters in May won’t be back. Many of the others would have voted in November, anyway.
Will turnout be higher than normal? Probably. But will it be earth-shattering and society-altering? I doubt it.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.