I was disappointed to hear that the Amendment 1 initiative passed. I don’t know all the legal ramifications of it, but I have gay family members and it seems like this amendment treats them like second class citizens. Not happy about that.
But I was shocked at the numbers from the State Board Of Elections and did some amateur election analysis check it out:
| D | R | L | Una | Total | |
| Registered in NC | 2,735,467.00 | 1,975,943.00 | 13,829.00 | 1,571,632.00 | 6,296,871.00 |
| % of registered | 43.44% | 31.38% | 0.22% | 24.96% | |
| Ballots cast For President | 958,950.00 | 966,833.00 | 1,925,783.00 | ||
| % | 49.80% | 50.20% | |||
| Against | For | ||||
| Amendment 1 | 832,283.00 | 1,303,994.00 | 2,136,277.00 | ||
| % | 38.96% | 61.04% |
One thing you have to keep in mind, is that Unaffiliated voters can request a Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, or non-partisan ballot. So their votes on the “ballots cast for president” would show up (mostly) in the D,R, and L columns.
The first shocking thing I see is the difference between voter registration and partisan ballots cast. One way to look at it is that the democrats got a 6.35% boost from the unaffiliated voters and the Republicans got a 18.82% boost from the unaffiliated. But that’s the best case scenario, assuming Democrats and Republicans had turned out in numbers proportionate to their registration. On the one hand, the republicans had a contested primary and the democrats didn’t. So that might indicate that Democrats turned out in fewer numbers than their registration percentage. On the other hand, Romney has been “the presumptive nominee” for several weeks now. So the fact that the Republican primary was technically contested doesn’t in my opinion give the Republicans a turnout advantage all by itself. On the third hand, the Republicans in general are probably more motivated since they are looking to oust the incumbent. I would love to see a break down that showed of the Democrat ballots cast, how many were cast by registered Democrats and how many were cast by Unaffiliated and likewise for the Republicans. But I don’t think those numbers are available.
The one thing I’d say about apparent turn out is that party registration is not a predictor of turn out. I don’t think polls that are taken of registered voters and then weighted by voter registration percentages are reliable indicators of the election. Polls that simply sample “likely voters,” people who say they are going to show up at the polls is probably a better indicator. Possibly a poll of likely voters that was weighted by party registration would be the best predictor of all, _if_ it also figured in Unaffiliated voters.
About amendment 1. I have lined up the “against” vote in the Democrat column and the “for” vote in the Republican column. Now I’ll grant that on the whole more Democrats voted Against than For and more Republicans voted For rather than Against. However, I’d add that the alignment might not be nearly as close as you many assume it is.
Note that even _if_ every single Democrat ballot that was cast was Against Amendment 1 and every Republican ballot cast was For Amendmen 1, the Amendment would have passed.
But the number of votes Against the amendment is significantly less than the number Democrat ballots cast, by about 126,000. Likewise the number of Republican ballots cast is way lower than the number of votes For, by about 337,161. That’s about 26%. So 26% of the vote For the Amendment came from either Unaffiliated voters casting non-partisan ballots or from people casting Democrat ballots.
I don’t think there’s a way to puzzle out from the election report numbers how much of each (Democrats and Unaffiliated) contributed to the 26%. But you can conduct some interesting thought experiments. Assuming Democrats and Republicans turned out in numbers proportionate to their party registration, and assuming all unaffiliated voters cast either Democrat or Republican ballots, and assuming the unaffiliated ballots are split up according to the apparent percentage increase they boosted the ballot cast percentages, it means that 60, 928 unaffiliated voters cast Democrat ballots. That means 898,021 Democrats cast Democrat ballots. Given that only 833,283 votes were cast against the Amendment. It means that at a bare minimum 65,738 registered Democrats, or 7.3% of the Democrat voters that showed up cast their vote For the amendment instead of Against. And that’s the best case scenario. Again, I don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that all Republicans voted For the amendment and all Democrats voted Against. But even if you took that assumption to the most extreme possible, you’d still have to conclude that 7.3 % of registered Democrats voted for the Amendment.
Pat and I went to the NC Botanical Gardens in Asheville this weekend and I saw these flower that I’d never seen before. They’re called Eastern Blue-Eyed Mary.