COVID Transplant Voters Could Change North Carolina’s Election Outcome

One of the battlegrounds that could determine the outcome of the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has seen a swell of new voters, and an expert told Newsweek how those new population numbers will play out.
Polls point to a close race in North Carolina, which has seen some of the highest population growth since 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in remote work saw thousands of people living in places like New York and San Francisco flee their offices for more affordable cities in the Sun Belt and South, which has seen a massive population boom over the past few years.
Texas, Florida and North Carolina are the three states that have seen the largest population growth since the pandemic, and North Carolina is one of the seven battlegrounds that could determine the outcome of the election. From 2020 to 2023, just over 396,000 people moved to the Tar Heel state.
That outpaces Trump’s victory in the state four years earlier when he carried North Carolina by only 74,000 votes, roughly 1.3 percentage points.
Those voters have the potential to shape the outcome of the presidential race in North Carolina. But they are also adding a level of uncertainty to an already-close election, as analysts say it’s unclear just how much of an impact they will have, as well as whether Democrats or Republicans will benefit from these new migration patterns.
Martin Kifer, the director of the High Point University Research Center, told Newsweek on Monday that it’s “hard to say” the extent to which these new voters will affect the election results.
“This election is the first presidential election that will give us a view about whether this in-migration really affects voting patterns,” he said. “This has been a very closely divided state over the past few election cycles.”
The election will be a “test run” of how these new voters will affect presidential politics in North Carolina.
The largest number of new North Carolina residents come from Florida, New York, Virginia, South Carolina and California, according to a report from Carolina Demography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The report showed that North Carolina received 36,000 new residents from Florida, 33,000 from New York, 30,000 from Virginia, 23,000 from South Carolina and 23,000 from California in 2021.
However, these voters’ partisan identities may not necessarily align with their states’ voting patterns, according to Kifer. Not every person who moves from California to North Carolina is a Democrat, and not everyone who moves from Florida will identify as a Republican.
“If we look at voting patterns of those states, without knowing exactly who came to North Carolina, it’s sort of a mixed bag,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that those folks are going to uniformly vote in any particular way.”
A surge in voters not identifying with either party makes it more difficult to track these effects, he said.
Democrats narrowly outpace Republicans in North Carolina voter registration, but most voters in the state are actually registered as “unaffiliated,” so it’s more difficult to know which way those voters are leaning ahead of the November 5 election
Any effects from these migration trends may be felt in more local legislative races, where a few thousand voters will have a larger impact than statewide races, according to Kifer.
While it is possible polls could be missing some migration dynamics, pollsters use several data sources to ensure their samples match the state overall. For instance, they look at both the U.S. Census data, the yearly American Community Survey and registration data, he said.
“Hopefully any big shifts, especially statewide, we’ll be able to have pretty clear view of, that we wouldn’t be surprised that much,” he said.
Polls are close in North Carolina. FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate on Monday showed Trump leading the state by 1.3 points. One month earlier, on September 28, Trump led by 0.4. Nationally, Harris holds a 1.4-point lead over Trump, according to the polling average.
North Carolina is one of seven toss-up states, the only one that backed Trump in 2020.
High Point University’s latest North Carolina poll showed Harris leading Trump by 1 point in the Tar Heel State. It found Harris winning support from 47 percent of respondents, compared to Trump’s 46 percent. It surveyed 1,164 registered voters from October 17 to October 20 and had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
A Marist College poll, conducted among 1,226 likely voters from October 17 to October 22, showed Trump up by two points (50 percent to 48 percent). Its results were statistically significant within plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, previously warned that “transplant COVID voters” could sway the election in North Carolina and other swing states in an interview on CNN last month.
“…And I think the unknown is: what type of voter moved during COVID to these Sun Belt states, and how will they vote?” he said.
Conversely, he noted that states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the three Great Lakes battlegrounds—that saw residents move out during the pandemic could also be affected by these population shifts.
“So, this could even have an impact on Pennsylvania and Michigan. We don’t who that voter is at this point in time,” he said.
Early voting began in North Carolina on October 17. Voters broke the record for first-day early voting, despite concerns that Hurricane Helene striking large swaths of the western areas of the state could cause a lag in voting. Election officials, however, have prioritized ensuring residents affected by the storm can easily make their voice heard in the election.
Experts, however, have cautioned against reading too much into early voting numbers, as millions of voters across the country are still likely to cast early ballots this week and on Election Day.