Primary elections are always low-turnout affairs, and North Carolina’s early-voting run-up to Super Tuesday is no exception, with a turnout thus far of just 6.6% statewide.
In a biennial orgy of obsessive-compulsive disorder, every election year EQV Analytics posts stats like that one, and many more, updated daily throughout the state’s 17-day early voting period. We do it because we believe strongly in the predictive power of early voting analysis. In 2016 for example we used early voting analysis to correctly predict that Hillary Clinton would lose in North Carolina (and, thus, probably nationally as well), even as pundits like the NY Times, FiveThirtyEight, and Daily Kos Elections were still predicting a Clinton landslide.
And this year’s numbers seem to be even more interesting. Sure, this is only the primary, but we find that primary voting patterns are often harbingers of those to be seen later, in the general.
First and foremost among those interesting stats are the impressive turnout numbers being posted by undergraduates at many of the state’s leading universities. We’ve never seen anything quite like it before (see chart, above).