Quote:
Originally Posted by Arles
Back to subject where I left it earlier, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that only 33% of North Carolina is registered republican and yet W got 56% of the state's vote in 2004.
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Maybe this will help ... The percentage of voters in NC
not registered as Democrats, i.e. GOP + unaffiliated + all 984 registered Libertarians = 54.6% of their current registered voters. Back in 2004 it was 53.22%.
Bush got 1.96 million votes in '04 and NC had 1.903 million registered Republicans, as well as 1.02 million unaffliated voters. There were 2.582 million registered Dems but Kerry managed only 1.525 million votes.
In other words, it's a combination of turnout by party plus what I imagine are a large number of unaffliated voters who trend GOP. Best I could tell from looking at their state voter registration stuff, there's no penalty to being registered unaffliated as you can still choose to vote in either party primary or a truly unaffiliated ballot which include only non-partisan races during primary season.