The fallacy of two-party politics in Beaufort County | Eastern North Carolina Now

If the “past is the best predictor of the future” then politics in Beaufort County is undergoing a quite revolution.  In a nutshell, the traditional “two-party” system is becoming a three-party system.  And more amazingly, the third party is developing without any structural support. 

The fastest growing segment of voter registrations is the unaffiliated vote, according to CarolinaElections.com.  Democrat registrations are continuing a historical decline while Republican registrations are increasing, but not as fast as unaffiliated registrations.

What we do not know is how the unaffiliated voters actually vote in the general elections.  One might assume they split along the same lines as the major parties but that would beg the question of:  If unaffiliated voters could be expected to consistently vote in proportions about the same as the two major parties then why do they register unaffiliated?  One might thus argue that they do not vote consistently according to party affiliation.  In other words, it may be that they vote more for a candidate and not so much for the party affiliation of the candidates.  We’ll never know until a strong candidate chooses to run as an unaffiliated candidate against a Democrat and a Republican and wins.

As of 2023, the distribution of registrations are 31.02% Democrat, 31.36% unaffiliated and 37.2% Republican.  So the most obvious conclusion based solely on numbers, is that the unaffiliated vote is the determiner of whether a Democrat wins or a Republican wins, depending of course on turnout.  In a close race between a Democrat and a Republican the unaffiliated vote will determine the winner, assuming the turnout is consistent with the registration.

Beaufort’s ‘Limited Voting” system for County Commissioner presents an interesting twist to the above statistical analysis.  What is clear statistically is that an unaffiliated candidate should be able to gain election as one of the three or one of the four candidates elected, if that candidate can attract most of the unaffiliated vote.  How to do that then becomes the intriguing question. 

The issue becomes even more intriguing when you factor gender into the mix.  There are no women on the Board of Commissioners and typically no women candidates run in either the Democrat or Republican primaries.  At some point a strong female candidate will figure out how to exploit this fact.