Another Look at NC Election Results | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post, Susan Myrick, was originally published in the Elections & Voting section(s) of Civitas's online edition.

    Elections can be viewed at many different angles, from analyzing voter turnout to interpreting vote totals. That's what consultants and candidates do to win races and election junkies do for fun. Voter turnout, broken down by demographics – i.e. party affiliation, gender, race and age ­– is important in understanding why the electorate votes the way they vote in any particular election. But looking beyond the demographics of the voters to the way people vote is perhaps more revealing as to the mood of the electorate at large. That's why we developed the Civitas Partisan Index (CPI). While the CPI is not a predictor of elections, it reveals which districts lean Republican or Democratic, and can illuminate voting trends in legislative districts and in the state as a whole.

    Given that we use the Council of State race votes to develop the CPI, we thought it might be interesting to go beyond the CPI maps that look at overall votes in legislative districts and focus on each individual Council of State contest. The maps below depict Council of State winners by legislative district. Using the same election data from the State Board of Elections, we determined the winner of the council races (with the exception of the 2012 uncontested attorney general's contest) in the legislative districts, then established how many candidates, in each party, won the district. The races included Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Commissioner of Agriculture, Commissioner of Insurance, Commissioner of Labor, Secretary of State, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State Treasurer and State Auditor. Interpreting this voting data is interesting because historically North Carolina voters tended to vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in the Council of State races.

    Out of 120 state House districts, 64 were won by all nine Republican Council of State candidates and 35 House districts were won by all nine Democratic candidates, leaving 21 districts with split votes. Of these, in 11 more than half of the Republican candidates were the top vote-getters, while in 10 Democrats received the most votes.

    The Senate map shows that out of 50 districts, 26 were won by all nine Republican candidates, while 16 districts were won by all nine Democratic candidates. The remaining eight districts were split, with Democrats winning the majority of Council races in three and Republicans winning the majority of contests in five.

    Comparing the maps on this page with the CPI maps and then looking at Civitas Vote Tracker and the voter registration database in Carolina Transparency helps develop a more comprehensive picture of what really happened in the 2012 General Election. We invite you to take a look and decide for yourself.

    Civitas strives to make election and voter data "user friendly" so that we don't have to rely on the left-leaning mainstream media to analyze election outcomes.