By Allen R. Gray
NDG Contributing Writer
As surely as curiosity will kill the cat, complacency born of the relative success of the 2020 elections will most certainly kill the Democrat.
Buncombe County, in Western North Carolina, has a population of about 269,452 residents according to the 2020 census. The county has all the factors that say its residents are going to get up and get out to vote for Democrats: approximately 77% of those residents are registered to vote; 39.63% have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher; 51.77% are women; and the median age is around 43 years old. That’s a little older than the national average of 38 years old—but Buncombe County residents are still considered young by voting standards.
Since 2004, when only 12% of the Buncombe County registered voters cast ballots during the primary, there has been a steady increase in voter participation. In 2020, over 42% of its registered voters participated.
Yet, in this year’s primary not too many of these historically Democratic leaning North Carolinians made the trek to the Oakley-Murphy Community Center to vote this past Super Tuesday. In the 2024 primary, only 28.5% of 208,204 Buncombe registered voters came out to vote. The alarming news is that Buncombe’s voter participation was higher than many of the larger counties in North Carolina. The second most populous county, Mecklenburg, home to the city of Charlotte, had under 19% of its registered voters cast ballots.
What is happening in Buncombe County should be a wakeup call to Democrats and Republicans alike as this apathetic trend has been echoed in states around the country.
Super Tuesday saw the political cornerstone states of Texas and California along with thirteen other states determine head-to-head races for president, the House and the Senate.
When the dust had settled in Texas and the polls were closed, about 3.2 million registered voters had cast their ballots—2.3 million of those ballots were cast for Republican candidates. Only a paltry 975,000 Democratic ballots were cast.
During the 2020 primary, over 4 million registered Texas voters turned out. Back then the number of Democratic ballots outpaced the Republican voter turnout. Albeit, in 2020 Democratic voters were desperate and looking to defeat an ad hoc despot who had lorded over the nation for the past four years.
Funny things have happened on the way to the Texas primaries. Since 2020, the number of people registered to vote has gone up and the number of people who turnout to vote has gone down. The lack of Democratic participation has accounted for all that recent decline. Meanwhile, Republican voter participation has experienced a slight increase.
So, has created this inverse turnout at the polls in Texas in 2024?
It is not necessarily the case that Democrats have been outvoted. They simply did not bother to show up at the polls.
The lack of Democratic turnout could be a product of the fear factor generated by Republicans zealots and is not necessarily a product of voter apathy.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his minion, Atty. Gen Ken Paxton, have been wheeling around on a vengeful crusade, and hunting Democratic voters like they were Nazi war criminals.
After all the paranoia that Abbott and Paxton created about voting irregularities, mail-in voting deception, voter fraud—and the new Texas voting laws—the two Texas deceivers may have succeeded in scaring early Democratic voters away from the polls. The 1.8 million people that voted early or by mail-in vote in 2024 represented only 10% of registered voters. This year’s early voting turnout fell 200,000 voters short of the early voting total for 2020 when at least two million people voted early.
Abbott and Paxton’s fright campaign, it appears, had a greater impact in the state’s most populus urban counties like Dallas, Harris, Bexar, and Travis counties considering the drop in the number of votes in those larger counties. The 24% of registered voters that showed up in 2020 fell to 13.9% in 2024. There is also a similar decline in voter turnout in Texas border counties.
Ironically, voter turnout in Texas’ 216 mostly rural counties, those counties that traditionally vote strongly Republican, had the smallest dip in participation rates, falling only by about 4.1%.
In 2019, a Black woman named Pamela Moses sought to do her civic duty. Moses attempted to register to vote, which she believed she had a right to do despite a felony being on her record. Moses was arrested and eventually sentenced to six years plus one day in prison for voter fraud. Her saga was fodder for national news.
That event gave Democrats something to think about. It is not a stretch to say that Moses’s conviction had a negative but profound impact on voters who are not Republican. There are not too many people who are willing to risk going to prison for executing their inalienable right.
A recent article quoted Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, who said, “Even the most frequent and hardy voters are confused about their state laws. I think Republicans are going to look at their laws and procedures in the next session. I think they are realizing that they are aggravating voters.”
Not only are voters aggravated, but they are also, in too many cases, afraid of violating some newly contrived voting law they did not even know exists.
It could be that the fear tactics of Republicans are having an impact on the opposing party…Or it might be that Texas Democrats are not too concerned about the preliminary bouts and are more focused on the main event. It is a foregone conclusion that it will be President Biden duking it out with an all but banished Donald Trump for the presidential belt.
There was only one other race Texas Democrats were overly concerned about. That was the race between U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and Roland Gutierrez, the senator from San Antonio, as they campaigned for a chance to get in the ring with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. After Super Tuesday, Democrats decided decisively that it would be Allred going toe-to-toe with Cruz.
The top of the ticket in the Democracy primary was much less competitive in 2024 than it was four years ago, when Joe Biden used Super Tuesday to surge to the top of a hotly contested Democratic presidential primary.
This coming November, though, the real battle will be the younger voters versus the older voters.
The influx of new Texas residents—there was a 4% growth from January 2020 to January 2023—has lowered the median age for Texans to 35.5 years old. A 2023 U.S. Census report lists the national median age at 38.9 years old. There were around 75,000 people under the age of 30 who voted early this year. That is about the same number of people aged 85 years old (and older) who voted early, as reported by one political consultant.
Voters in all demographic groups and identifiable gender classifications, who are younger, more educated and “woke” tend to shy away from the Republican rhetoric and minutia and vote Democratic.
In the final round, it is only over-zealous party activists and self-serving politicians who tend to place importance on primary races. To most everyone else election primaries are like a bigtime boxing match where no one really cares much about the preliminary bouts.
