Tuesday’s municipal elections were as dismal for Republicans locally as they were nationwide, with results such as only one of the Wake GOP’s twenty-two endorsed candidates achieving electoral victory being attributed by party leadership to fallout from the “Schumer Shutdown.”
Out of 157 (unofficially) successful candidates analyzed by the Triangle Trumpet in municipalities in or extending into eleven counties of the Greater Triangle area, 95 of the winners were registered as Democrats, while only 32 were registered as Republicans and 30 were registered as Unaffiliated.1
However, given the unequal distribution of partisan voters and the propensity of even “non-partisan” elections to be conducted along party lines, it is perhaps more apt to examine the results in light of the specific electorate in each municipality and district.
For instance, although a 26-year incumbent on the Cary Town Council was unseated, it is not exactly a shock given that Jennifer Robinson is a Republican, and her fellow party-members in the district are outnumbered by registered Democrats 8,094 to 5,742.
“I had many people telling me that they had supported me in the past but would not vote for me this year for one reason: I am a registered Republican,” wrote Robinson.
Voter registration data shows that registered Democrats significantly outnumber registered Republicans in the majority of the 46 municipalities under consideration:
The unofficial election results show a strong correlation between partisan electoral success and the party affiliation of the electorate, with registered Democrats winning 67 out of the 102 seats occurring in jurisdictions where Democrats outnumbered Republicans.
Although Republicans did score 15 electoral victories in these unfavorable races, with Democrats being nearly twice as likely to be elected by a Republican-dominated electorate than vice versa.
Democrats were also very successful in races in which the Republicans only held a small advantage in the electorate, taking 12 out of 15 such races, including in seven in Wake County where Democratic candidates were elected to the mayorships of Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina as well as the five open seats on the respective town council and board of commissioners.
Voters in smaller electorates were the most likely to select a candidate from the minority party in the jurisdiction, with 18 out of the 23 candidates overcoming an electorate disadvantage of more than 10 points doing so in a race with fewer than 2,689 registered voters.
The largest municipality or electorate in which a candidate overcame such odds was on the Zebulon, where Republican George D. Roa appears to have received enough votes (by a slim margin) to take second out of two seats on the Board of Commissioners in a town where registered Republicans are outnumbered 996 to 2,895 by registered Democrats.
Although Wake County Republicans underperformed in the two largest GOP-leaning municipalities in these eleven counties, Republican candidates did win in smaller yet unfavorable jurisdictions in the surrounding counties such as Bunn, Franklinton, Butner, Creedmoor, Stovall, Selma, Smithfield, Wilsons Mills, and Kittrell.
Although the full unofficial election results can be perused on the North Carolina Board of Elections website by county and race, party affiliation is not listed for these non-partisan races.
The following data is gleaned from the voter registration records for the winning candidates: it should be noted that a candidate registered as Unaffiliated is not necessarily unaligned with a major party. (A more comprehensive list could perhaps be compiled by reviewing the endorsements of the local parties.)