According to a recent report by personal finance website WalletHub, North Carolina is the 10th best-represented state on Election Day.
The report identified which states’ voting populations most closely resemble their electorates.
WalletHub compared the distribution of the 50 states’ voters to the distribution of their electorates by key demographic characteristics, including age, race, and gender. They also analyzed how voters nationally reflect the US electorate, including employment status, family income, educational attainment, and marital status.
Each demographic category was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the lowest absolute difference between the state voter distribution and the state population distribution.
They then calculated overall scores for each state using the weighted average across all metrics, which were then used to determine WalletHub’s State Voter Representation Index.
In addition, they used the same metrics to create their National Voter Representation Index. For this part of the analysis, however, they compared the national voter distribution to the US electorate distribution using the same demographic traits they used for the states, plus employment status, family income, educational attainment, and marital status.
“States where the voting population most closely matches the electorate are more likely to elect representatives and institute policies that help all demographics,” said Cassandra Happe, WalletHub analyst.
She added that when large segments of the population skip the ballot box, it can skew future economic and social policies to favor those who do vote to the detriment of those who don’t.
WalletHub said they only considered data from the 2020 presidential election for both the state and national analyses.
Here is how they found the voters’ representation of North Carolina’s electorate:
- Overall Representation: 92.47%
- Racial Representation: 91.50%
- Age Representation: 88.22%
- Gender Representation: 97.69%
According to a recent Carolina Journal article, in 2020, 5.5 million votes were cast out of roughly 11 million people in North Carolina.
New Jersey came in first place, followed by New York, Maryland, Alabama, California, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida, and North Carolina, which rounded out the top ten. Oklahoma came in 50th place.