Early Voting for North Carolina Presidential Primary

The North Carolina State Board of Elections does something very cool--they put all of their early voting data up on their website for easy download. So, of course I just had to download the data this morning and do a little crunching to see what types of people are voting early for the May 6th primary.

Based on the data I downloaded this morning, 144,440 voters have cast valid early ballots so far in North Carolina. Of that number, 117,655 have requested a Democratic ballot for the primary (only 26,371 have requested a Republican ballot, with the rest taking an unaffiliated ballot). Based on party registration figures included in the data, 68.6% of early voters are registered Democrats, 16.1% are registered Republicans, and 15.3% are registered as unaffiliated. 84% of the early voters who are registered as unaffiliated voted in the Democratic party. These voters make up 15.8% of those who have already voted in the Democratic primary with Democrats making up the rest.

The great thing about this data is that it includes the race and gender of those who have voted early, so we can take a look at a few different demographics. The table below presents the racial and gender makeup of early voters in North Carolina so far:

	% of Early Voters
White	59.10%
Black	37.20%
Male	40.40%
Female	59.10%
White Men	25.20%
White Women	33.70%

It certainly bodes well for Barack Obama that over one-third of the early voters are African American, since this group has supported him at such a high rate. White women, on the other hand, have been a very strong group for Hillary Clinton, and they also make up one-third of the early voters in the state.

I'll present some more information from these data as the week goes on.