North Carolina’s unaffiliated primary voters lean Democratic, 61–39

Of the 377,501 unaffiliated voters who had cast an accepted early ballot in North Carolina by Oct 22, 2026, 262,596 have voted in at least one party primary since 2017. Among them, 160,307 last took a Democratic ballot and 102,289 a Republican ballot. That is 61% Democratic and 39% Republican.

The remaining 114,905 unaffiliated early voters, about 30%, have no primary ballot on record in that period.

What it means

Unaffiliated voters are the second-largest group in North Carolina’s early electorate: 34.4% of early voters, against 43.0% Democrats and 22.5% Republicans. How they lean matters for any reading of the early vote, and the primary record is one of the few direct traces of it in state data.

The trace points toward Democrats. Among unaffiliated early voters who have chosen a party’s primary ballot, Democratic ballots outnumber Republican ones by about 58,000.

This is also why the last-primary shortcut overstates both parties in North Carolina. It moves these 262,596 unaffiliated voters into a party, and the larger part of them into the Democratic column.

What it doesn’t mean

A primary ballot is not a general-election vote. Voters pick a primary for many reasons: the more competitive race, a local contest, a candidate they want to stop. An unaffiliated voter who last took a Democratic ballot may still vote Republican in November.

It does not describe all unaffiliated voters. The 30% with no primary history are left out, and they may lean differently from those who vote in primaries. In 2024, unaffiliated North Carolinians as a whole split very differently between the races for President and Governor, which shows how much their vote depends on the contest.

It does not measure the 2026 electorate as a whole. These are early voters only, as of Oct 22. Election Day voters, and voters who have yet to vote early, may differ.

It is not a trend. We did not compute the same split for earlier cycles, so we cannot say whether 61–39 is high or low for this group.

How we checked

We used the North Carolina State Board of Elections absentee file for the Nov 3, 2026 general, keeping only accepted ballots (1,096,068 in all, as of 05:19 ET on Oct 22, 2026). Each record carries the voter’s registered party.

We joined it on voter ID to the statewide voter history file dated Oct 18, 2026, which records the party ballot each voter chose in every primary since 2017. For each unaffiliated early voter, we took the most recent Democratic or Republican primary ballot.

The window changes the split a little. Counting only the March 2026 primary, 108,702 unaffiliated early voters took a Democratic ballot and 59,182 a Republican one, about 65–35, and more than half had no 2026 primary ballot. We report the full 2017–2026 window because it covers the most voters.

The counts come from the same join used in our test of the last-primary shortcut. No voter-level data was kept; only the aggregate counts were stored.