What does it all mean? Well, stay tuned.
Raleigh, N. C. — The early voting trend looks a lot more like a presidential election year than it does a midterm election.
After five days of early voting, including the first weekend, more than 450,000 people have voted, according to statistics compiled Monday by Catawba College Professor Michael Bitzer, one of North Carolina’s authorities on politics and voting.
Those numbers are a lot more like 2016 than 2014, let alone the last time North Carolina had a “blue moon” election like this year’s election – a ballot without a presidential, gubernatorial or U. S. Senate race.
What’s it all mean? Too soon to say, Bitzer said Monday.
“If this trend of looking like a presidential election continues to hold (and we may/may not see that happen this week), then I would think that all bets are off for what this truly portends,” the political science professor said in an email. “We’ve never seen something like this kind of an early start to the polls in a North Carolina mid-term election, so we may be comparing apples to watermelons.”
Here’s some initial analysis from Bitzer, though:
