Democrats Are Losing Members in N.C. But Are the Republicans Gaining?

A recent New York Times article proclaimed that the Democratic Party faces a full-blown “voter registration crisis.” According to the Times analysis, “In 2018, Democrats accounted for 66 percent of voters who newly registered as either Democratic or Republican. By 2024, the party’s share had shrunk to less than 48 percent.”

Similar trends are at play in North Carolina. The Democratic Party dominated politics in the Old North State for the better part of a century, and voter registration patterns reflected this.

But the gap is closing.

As of September 27, Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a mere 9,968 registered voters. At the current rate of change, Republicans will eclipse Democrats by early 2026, if not sooner.

These trends should alarm the Democratic Party and may indeed signify the “crisis” the Times cited. But it’s premature to make the leap that Democratic pain equals Republican gain in North Carolina.

Since 1988, Democrats’ share of party registration has dropped a whopping 34 percentage points—down from 65 percent in 1988 to 31 percent today. These are, indeed, hair-on-fire numbers for the party.

The Republican share of the electorate, however, has not increased at the same rate. In fact, it remained static. Republicans made up 30 percent of registered voters in 1988, and they make up 30 percent today. The story of party change in North Carolina is not one of Democratic decline and Republican gain, but rather one of Democratic decline and Republican stability.

The real beneficiary? The “Unaffiliated.” 

In 1988, about 5 percent of voters here were registered as unaffiliated. Today, unaffiliated voters make up about 38 percent of registered voters, more than a seven-fold increase.

This increase isn’t contained to certain kinds of places. Unaffiliated voters make up the largest group of registered voters in 26 counties, and the second-largest group in 72 others. They are the largest group of registered voters in liberal meccas like Buncombe County, Republican strongholds like Camden County, and purple counties like New Hanover.

A Generational Shift

What accounts for this dramatic rise in the unaffiliated? There are two possible answers: Either the growth is coming from people changing their registration, or it is emerging through natural patterns of people entering and leaving the voting population.

Fortunately, the North Carolina State Board of Elections keeps data that can provide an answer.

In 2024, around 91,000 people switched their registration from unaffiliated to a different party, while about 93,600 switched from a specific party to unaffiliated—for a net gain of around 2,600 unaffiliated voters.

To put those numbers into perspective, more than 270,000 people were added to the registry as unaffiliated in 2024. This means party switchers made up less than 1 percent of the total gain.

The lion’s share of the partisan shift, therefore, is due to generational change.

Among people ages 18 to 45, unaffiliateds are the largest number of registered voters; Democrats are second, except among 18- and 19-year-olds, where Republicans outnumber Democrats.

Among voters ages 46 to 65, the unaffiliated still lead the way, with Republicans in second place.

Democrats make up the plurality of the electorate that is over the age of age 66, followed by Republicans, and then unaffiliated.

As these older voters die, they are replaced with younger voters who are, more often than not, registered as unaffiliated. In North Carolina, these patterns of generational change have produced a dramatic decline in Democratic Party registration.

Structure Matters

So, why are young people increasingly choosing “none of the above”? Some of it is likely based on the declining appeal of party brands, but that’s not the whole story. 

Individual state laws around party registration and primary participation are key to explaining why the party-of-none dominates in North Carolina, while independents make up less than 5 percent of the electorate in Kentucky.

Before 1977, there was no unaffiliated option in North Carolina. Voters could register with a political party, or as “Independent” or “No Party.” Both designations allowed registrants to vote in a party primary, change their registration to one of the existing parties, and cast a ballot.

Then the General Assembly passed a bill eliminating independent and no party as options and reclassified the 93,000 voters in those categories as unaffiliated. 

The same bill restricted those unaffiliated voters from changing parties until after the election results were finalized—ensuring that unaffiliated voters were excluded from primaries. From 1977 through 1988, fewer than 5 percent of voters opted for unaffiliated.

In 1988, however, Republicans made a strategic decision to open their primaries to unaffiliated voters. “We think it will help us register people as Republicans, and we also think they ought to have an opportunity to have a voice in our primary system,” North Carolina GOP Chair Jack Hawke told journalist Tim Funk at the time.

Democrats took a different tack. “Democrats ought to nominate Democratic candidates,” Ken Eudy, who was then executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party, argued at the time. “If you want to vote to nominate the party’s standard bearers, then you ought to be a member of the party.” 

Reflecting back now, Eudy says he didn’t make that decision on his own, but in consultation with then-Speaker of the House Liston Ramsey and Lt. Gov. Bob Jordan. Ultimately, it was practical politics that drove them to keep the primary closed.

“We had such a dominant position at that point that it didn’t make any sense to do it,” he said. “I do think if you get somebody to vote in a primary that you could get them to vote for you in the general election as a rule of thumb. But, you know, I don’t think it was something that I was interested in going to the mat on.”

Gerry Cohen, a long-serving Democratic appointee to the Wake County Board of Elections who worked for the General Assembly at that time, recalled that “much of the opposition was from Black political groups who feared dilution of their influence by the then overwhelmingly white unaffiliated voters.”

But by 1996, the Democrats found themselves losing in voter registration, losing elections, and eventually, losing power—all of which made the political math shift in important ways. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” was ascendant, and Republicans took over both the U.S. House and the state house. “The ground had really shifted by ’96,” said Eudy.

Recognizing that shift, the Democratic Party cleared the way to allow unaffiliated registrants, who numbered around 381,000 at the time, to participate in their primary.

“I evolved on the issue like a lot of people did,” said Democrat David Price, a Duke University professor who penned a book on political parties and went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years. “As more and more people were registering as independents, it became clear that there was something of a disenfranchisement argument to be made.”

He also felt the closed primary was skewing results toward candidates who mainly had the backing of the base—“the most activist, the most ideological”—who then struggled to win more moderate voters in the general election.

Once both primaries opened to unaffiliated voters, registered voters were faced with a new choice: register as unaffiliated and choose which primary to vote in, or register with a party and limit their options. Unsurprisingly, people increasingly went with the former.

Today, when North Carolinians register to vote, they can register as Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, or unaffiliated. If they skip the question entirely, they are logged as unaffiliated—further contributing to the large number of those voters today.

The Door Shuts on Change

The solution for the parties might seem obvious: close the primaries again. But that option is now off the table.

In 2023, Senate Bill 747 essentially cemented the dominance of the unaffiliated by barring parties from closing their primaries.

As Republican state Sen. Kevin Corbin, a co-sponsor of that bill, told The Assembly the provision was added to keep unaffiliated voters engaged with the Republican Party. “Why cut them off?” he said. “Voters get muscle memory. If they vote for you in the primary, they’re more likely to vote for you in the general.” 

The dominance of the unaffiliated seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

So while the number of registered Democrats is indeed in decline (and, arguably, a reason to think the party is “in crisis”), Republicans are not the beneficiaries of this decline thus far. 

The winner, it seems, is “none of the above.”