Fun with numbers:
North Carolina
Registered since 1/5/08
Democrats: 105,549 (56.4%)
Republicans: 14,332 (7.6%)
Unaffiliated: 66,898 (35.7%)Blacks: 64,870 (39.7%)
Whites: 98,287 (60.2%)Compared to 2003
Democrats: +230,489
Republicans: +210,296
Unaffiliated: +358,756Blacks: +225,820
Whites: +472,054
Democrats have regained all the registration losses in North Carolina from 2004 and are now 20,000 votes ahead of where they were in 2003. Where did the numbers come from?
In 2003, blacks made up 19.3% of the electorate in North Carolina. Today, they make up 20.5% of the electorate. Since January blacks have accounted for 40% of new registrations.
Consider what this means.
Since 2003, 225,000 new black voters have registered compared to 230,000 new Democratic voters.
I do not have numbers to tell me what percentage of blacks in North Carolina have registered as unaffiliated or Republicans, but I suspect it is relatively small percentage.
Meanwhile, even though the biggest surge since 2003 is in voters registering as unaffiliated, since January the surge has been mainly to Democrats.
This means white Republicans are reregistering as unaffiliated while blacks are registering for the first time as Democrats.
Also, there clearly was a huge surge of white voters that registered as Republicans for the 2004 election, who have no dropped their GOP affiliation. That explains why the Democrats are only up 20,000 votes since 2003 overall, even though they are up 90,000 just since January.
If we consider which voters are most likely to not vote if Clinton is the nominee, it has to new voters that support Obama who have not established a pattern of voting. If North Carolina blacks follow the pattern of Pennsylvania and vote for Obama at a 90% clip, that means that there are nearly a quarter of a million voters that fit into that category. In 2004, Bush won North Carolina by 436,000 votes.
I just got an email from Obama asking me to personally go to North Carolina to canvass for him. This email went out to his whole list. I’m surprised at the ask. I wonder how many will heed the call. And I wonder whether half the people got requests to go to Indiana? They are close to same distance away from me, but I guess Carolina is a little closer.
Missouri is requested to go to Indiana.
Makes sense to me. You going?
I’ve been thinking about doing it on Saturday. But I might just stay here and phone bank – I don’t lose as much time driving. It’s 3-4 hours just to get to the Indy border. Then by the time you get to into Evansville or Terre Haute or even Indianapolis and find the location – it’s a lot of time that might be better spent on the phone.
On the other hand … I hate phone banking and I love going door to door. 🙂
Me too. I hate the phone.
Ya know, it wouldn’t be so hard for me to canvass NC….but I have this social anxiety thing. Do people shut the door in your face?
rarely, although it does happen.
Most people are very friendly.
Door-to-door canvassing is very much a matter of getting your feet wet.
Obama’s headquarters doesn’t use role-playing, but I did. I would have every canvasser practice knocking doors in the office, where I would play a particularly skeptical person and they would learn approaches for swinging me to register to vote, or to go out and vote. I was non-partisan by law, but it works the same.
Try it on your dog, or husband.
My dog is smarter than my husband. I’ll try her first.
I had a feeling. Pooches for Obama.
I thought the door-to-door thing was fun. We only had one memorable incident when we went out, and it was more funny than anything else. I also liked the feeling that I was actually doing something positive instead of reading someone else’s spin on the race…and it made primary day fly by.
Give it a try – they’ll pair you up with someone if you need a partner, and there were all sorts of nice people in from out of state to help here in PA. If you decide it isn’t your thing, you can contribute another way, and don’t have to do it a second time.
It’s happened rarely to me and every single time it’s just been funny. Because the people obviously have other issues. Usually they are really nice once they figure out you aren’t trying to convert them to a religion. 🙂
The campaign will pair you up with a partner if you want one so you have someone to laugh with.
They give you a little script.
A script? The last time I had to follow a script I was playing Mary Magdalene in like 3rd grade. Yes, a whore…
It’s really just an outline. What questions to ask. With little number codes for the answers. Although by this point, so close to the election I would hope they aren’t doing real canvassing and it’s all GOTV – in other words you should be hitting friendly doors and reminding them of where their polling place is and making sure they are going to vote RAIN OR SHINE and “we can count you, right?” and “Be sure to bring someone other than yourself to the polls – double your impact!”.
Then the worst that happens to you is the person says, in an exasperated way, I’ve told you people THREE TIMES that I’m going to show up to vote for him. 🙂
What mary already said…
When I did it Monday and Tuesday of last week, people were excited and looking forward to the primary. On primary day, MANY people had already voted, and were just excited and anxiously looking forward to the results, hoping he’d win, or waiting for their husband to come home and stay with the kids while they voted.
The worst thing that happened was someone told me she had already voted, and then snidely added “for Hillary”. I just smiled and wished her good luck…
A lot of people were there knocking doors for the first time an d had never volunteered to help a campaign before, and everyone I spoke to was looking forward to doing it again in November for the general.
Some Obama people canvassed the house this weekend when I wasn’t home. B was able to tell them that all FIVE of us were voting for him….
that’s a regular. I got the go PA, Indiana, N.Carolina, and KY. And you’d be surprised the response back to campaign HQ.
I’m doing phone banking.
We’re asked to go to NC in Mississippi, too — not a big shock! Phoning in is easier to manage, and I’ll probably have to settle for it. But I’ve noticed this: phoning to me tends to be more draining; more of a drag, where door-to-door is energizing; you kind of feed off it. Interesting.
In other words, registration among black folks seems to be skyrocketing since Obama won Iowa. Indies are growing rapidly as a share of the electorate there, too. This is great news.
Right, but what were the numbers immediately before Iowa?
Good question. Probably not as strong.