The North Carolina Senate race has tightened. Thom Tillis and his campaign argue that he has the momentum going into Election Day. That’s not really true. Yes, he appears to be getting closer to Hagan after trailing her for the past two and half months. But it’s more a function of Tillis picking up support from the small number of undecided voters than any shift of the general electorate toward the speaker.
The last undecided voters almost always break for the challenger. However, they aren’t breaking by large enough margins to shift the lead. If anything, they’ve drawn even, but I suspect, given the recent polls, that Hagan is still up by a point or so.
The Tillis campaign told a bunch of donors that they have him tied for the first time ever. We don’t know what that means. It could be a single tracking poll or it could be a trend in their polling, but they were talking to donors and if that’s the best news they could give them, that’s not much of a vote of confidence.
The Hagan internals still have her holding a narrow lead and the public polls released show the race either tied or Hagan up by a small margin. She needs to go into Election Day tied or better. If she can do that, Democrats believe, their massive ground game can carry her over the top. So far, the strategy seems to be working.
Democrats are maintaining a solid lead in the early votes. Including accepted mail-in ballots, Democrats have a 16 point advantage over Republicans. The make up of the electorate also favors them. Twenty-five percent of the vote is African-American and women make up 54%. Over the past two days, voters under the age of 45 have seen a 2% uptick and the average age of the electorate is falling.
The big unknown are the unaffiliated voters. Like Democrats, they are outperforming 2010 numbers by large margins. Since, Republican numbers have only reached 2010 numbers in the past day, the surge in unaffiliated voters appears to be part of the Democratic turnout operation. Thirty percent of them didn’t vote in 2010 and if they are Hagan voters, Democrats could go into Election Day with a very large margin. The GOP will need a very robust same-day program to offset the deficit.
This race was always going to go down to the wire. North Carolina is probably the most competitive state in the nation but, regardless of the 2010 and 2012 elections, it’s still trending blue. In a year like this one, Kay Hagan should have been blown out. Instead, she still holds a slim advantage. We may count votes for a month, but in the end, I believe Kay Hagan will be the first Democrat from North Carolina re-elected to the US Senate since Sam Ervin.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
See the Randy Owens ad for Thom Tillis for U.S. Senate in North Carolina? News flash people – Randy (who’s claim to fame and source of massive political insight is that he is the former lead singer with country group Alabama) has absolutely NO connection with North Carolina. If recent history follows, Republicans will probably post this same ad in other southern states with only the candidate and state names changed. Richard Petty posted a similar ad for Tillis. It’s clearly aimed at “Joe 6-pack” and is insulting to voter intelligence! This kind of 8th grade Republican b.s. shows their desperation!
A quick crunch of the early voting through 10-31 gives us:
A quick crunch of the statewide totals for early voting this morning gives us:
Party Affilication Raw Votes Percent
Democrat 497743 47.6
Libertarian 1671 0.2
Republican 334010 32
Unaffiliated 211871 20.3
Total 1045295
Yesterday was a big day. The Dems now have a 160,000 vote advantage in registered voters, and the early vote turnout will break 40% of the 2010 total today. The Get Haugh, Get High ads don’t really seem to be doing the job, though.
Dr Bitzer is saying the D vote is up 40% from 2010, while the R vote has held steady. That’s a substantial advantage, since the nearly 900,000 votes already in represent a third of the 2010 vote total. In the current hyper-partisan environment, cross-party votes will probably be low. How the 30% of those votes that are unaffiliated will break is critical. If they break 50-50 (which would not be surprising given the current perception of Republicans due to the NCGA performance), that’s a 58-42 Hagan advantage out of 900,000 votes, or about 140,000 votes. If they break 3:1 R, that’s a 52-47 Hagan lead, or a 45,000 vote lead. If they break 3:1 D, that’s a 63:37 Hagan advantage, or about 220,000 votes.
There’s two more days of early voting, so the early vote will probably total over 1 million votes. For reference, the 2010 turnout was about 2.65 million votes, IIRC.
There’s certainly room for guarded optimism for the Dems here. Baby, get out and vote!