- [Kelly] Early voting begins with a roaring start, Martin Robinson dials back the lawsuit demands on CNN, and lawmakers convene to continue funding Hurricane Helene recovery.

This is "State Lines."

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[lively music] ♪ - Welcome to "State Lines."

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me for this week's show, Dawn Vaughan of the "News & Observer."

To her right, we have two great political strategists from the top of the mountain, Morgan Jackson, and Paul Shumaker, representing the Democrats and the Republicans.

Mitch Kokai's in seat four with the John Locke Foundation.

Paul, welcome to "State Lines."

- Great, thank you, Kelly.

- We've got an experienced group here, so a lot to talk about.

Let's just start with early voting.

We're just over one week into the early voting season here in North Carolina, and turnout is statistically record-breaking.

Through October 23rd, over 2 million ballots have been cast.

There are about 7.8 million of you out there across our state who are registered voters.

So there's still work to do to get to the ballot box.

It appears early voting turnout is roughly split between Democrats and Republicans.

Dawn, a lot to talk about here.

The longer we let this early voting process go through these cycles, folks sure seem to like it.

- There's always gonna be, I mean, you know, time marches on.

Everything is a record.

People raise more money.

People vote more, unless, like, there was some major thing where people didn't as much.

And a lot of what I've seen is, "Don't compare it to 2020."

Of course, that was COVID times.

That's a different era, but I think we're looking at, Board of Elections said we're probably up to more than 2 million people who have early voted.

I think it's more of, obviously people like it, both parties now.

It used to be more Democratic.

Now I think it's about half and half Republicans and Democrats.

But you know, it's more convenient for people.

So that's why they do it.

- Morgan, let me ask you about the typical early voter.

They have to be enthusiastic because pre-election, early voting, you stand in line for two hours.

On election day, a lot of times, you walk in your precinct and vote in 15 minutes.

Why do people choose to to go about it the long way, the hard way?

- Well, because we live in a world these days where you can do things when you want to, and it's instant sort of gratification, and it's on demand.

If you want a doctor's appointment, you want it today.

If you want to vote, you would prefer to vote on your timeline rather than wait on election day and say, "What am I doing that day?"

I'll tell you, some of the things that we are seeing in early vote, Kelly, you alluded to it, is it really is base voters that are turning out at this point.

It Republicans and Democrats and then unaffiliated, that a lot of the unaffiliated that are turning out at this point really are partisan actors.

They lean largely one way or the other.

We are seeing 85% of the voters that cast a ballot in early vote as of yesterday, which is the latest data, had all voted in 2020.

And these are folks that when we model and score these voters, these are either really hard Red voters or really hard Blue voters.

And I will tell you that what we are not seeing is a lot of the swing voters that are turning out really early.

That tells me they're waiting to make up their minds, and I think you're gonna see a lot of those swing voters go break.

And I don't think this is North Carolina phenomenon.

You see it in a lot of battleground states.

I think these swing voters are gonna move in mass, one way or the other.

And that's what makes closing arguments by especially the presidential campaign so important right now.

- When should a candidate start making their closing arguments in this type of cycle?

- It's mid-September.

- They've already started.

- So it's already- - No, you know, I think you really see it in the last week to 7, 8, 10 days.

You have certainly seen Harris begin to make her closing argument against Trump.

I would love to say Trump's making closing argument, but he does something randomly weird and different every single day.

But it is, they are certainly, his campaign is trying to keep him on message to make a closing argument, and you see it in their ads.

But Trump sort of goes out every day and creates his own narrative.

- You're guiding Team Stein.

What would Josh Stein do this final 10 days?

Does he need to make a case?

- So what Stein's doing is spending a lot of time traveling to state, meeting voters, doing canvas kickoffs, knocking on doors, especially working with legislative candidates is our goal is to break the super majority and working with other council states to make sure that we have more Democrats who can win this cycle.

- All right, Paul, tell us about early voting.

There's a narrative out there that Republicans are just flooding the zone in North Carolina.

It's massively successful early voting.

You have a different perspective on this.

What is that on the early voting terms of when we hear about record breaking turnout?

- Well, a couple things.

First of all, we've added 490,000 new voters since 2020 presidential election year.

And those are active voters.

During that period of time, so, you know, that make up of 440,000 of them are independents, 40,000 are Republicans, and then the rest are Democrats.

We've had a net purge of 1.7 million.

Well, actually we added 1.7 million new voters.

We had a purge of 1.2 million.

That's where that number comes from.

And what we're seeing this time, and I'm very encouraged with what we're seeing on early voting is, is that Republicans and Democrats are performing right about the same levels.

Unaffiliates are not there right now.

And so, Morgan, I agree with you, that I think that there's swing voters are waiting late in the game to see if there's any last minute surprises.

However, when you look at the performance and everything from what's encouraging, Wake County is voting higher levels, but Wake County has added more new voters in the last four years than any other county in the state.

Mecklenburg surprisingly, is off of the 2020 mark, and Mecklenburg is the second largest county.

So that's prop.

So I see Mecklenburg and Wake County canceling themselves out, and rural turnout continues to be strong for Republicans.

- Paul, are there a higher percentage of people voting early in North Carolina, or just sheer numbers because we have more people in North Carolina?

Where's the record being broken?

- Actually, it's neither.

- [Kelly] Okay.

- And I actually, I'm a person who believes that we're going to continue to see increased voter turnout.

Numbers improve.

Just like we saw in the midterms in 2022, we had over a 50% turnout.

Actually in 2018, we had a 50% turnout.

And that's driven by technology.

We're able today to, first of all, we know who votes every day.

And so we're able to go out and start communicating from a campaign perspective, and we can send you a text message and saying that the wait time at this early voting site is less than five minutes that's close to you.

And so what you have now is you have technology driving the game.

The days of going door to door, the days of door to door is only to those who are low propensity voters.

Mid propensity voters, high propensity voters, they're getting a whole different level of communication.

And it allows technology to work.

It allows, just because of our mobile devices and what we have, that's going to help increase participation.

- Mitch, what do you make of the early voting turnout?

Do you see what the consultants are saying?

It's, you know, A, it's nice people are voting, but there seems to be a difference between what media and Twitter and others have said about turnout North Carolina versus what the people who actually run campaign see.

- Yeah, a couple of points.

First of all, you asked why would people want to vote early.

One thing we haven't mentioned yet is, once you vote, you stop getting all that contact from the campaign.

So a lot of people just don't want to hear from these folks, whether they are hardcore Democrats or hardcore Republicans.

They wanna get the messages over with, they know how they're gonna vote, they just wanna stop hearing from people.

So that's one factor, and that's tied into the technology that was discussed.

The other thing that we haven't mentioned yet is, one thing that has been noticed by the people who do pay attention so much to the numbers, is that for the first time ever, Republicans have overtaken Democrats in terms of the numbers in early voting.

And it seemed to be a couple of factors at play.

One, is that Republicans and their ally groups have spent a lot of time over the last couple of cycles trying to convince people, no, don't be these conservatives who will only vote on election day.

These other options do work.

You'll like them, you'll get used to it.

And so that seems to have borne some fruit that Republicans and Republican leaning voters have been more inclined to do that.

The second thing, at least at this point is that Democrats numbers at this point have been lower than they were in previous cycles.

That doesn't mean that they'll end up being lower, but so far they have been lower while the Republican numbers have been higher.

And so it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out on the Republican side.

I think one of the most interesting things that we won't know probably until election night or maybe even afterward, is are all of the people who are voting now for Republicans, people who were voting on election day before, and it'll end up being a wash, or are they getting more people now?

And because they'll be able to push for the lower propensity voters to get out as we get closer to election day and election day itself, does that mean they get a higher total turnout?

- I'll ask you Morgan, is it a wave of voters coming in or is Republican, in your opinion, just changing their habits of how they vote, whether it's election day or before?

- It's truly mode switching what we're seeing, is we're not seeing, as Paul talked about, a lot of low propensity voters voting at this point.

They just haven't turned out on either side or even in the middle.

When you think about Republicans in general, we were looking at, I've been looking at this every day and because a lot of folks on my side of the aisle are sweating like, wait a minute, what does this mean?

These are voters who voted in 20, they voted either on election day or they voted early late.

So they're just Republicans who are voting earlier and Mitch is exactly right.

It's what happens when you see Trump and folks and allies embrace early voting rather than say, "No, do it, it's fraud.

Don't do it."

They are encouraging Republicans to vote early, so of course their running program do it.

Republicans are saying, I'm not gonna wait till election day or the last weekend before the election.

I'm gonna vote early and the last thing I'll say is what we traditionally see in early voting is the first Thursday through Sunday, Democrats run up this ridiculous number and score, but the week that we just had, Republicans generally catch up.

And so Republicans, even as early voters have been later, early voters in history passed, they're just voting earlier this time.

But again, it's not new voters, it's just mode switching.

- Paul, talk to me about this idea.

I've seen this in tweets and other postings about banking the vote, get out there if you're a Republican and vote and put it in the, I think Robinson was saying this, bank your vote and then you can turn your attention elsewhere.

What does that mean?

And is it really, is that a strategy of any sort when you get early votes in, does it- - Well, I mean, a couple things is that what Robinson's doing?

Talking about banking the votes for Mark Robinson, the [indistinct] of matter is, I disagree because I look at the data analytics.

And we have ongoing daily analysis of what's taking place.

Right now, Republicans are not cannibalizing their election day vote.

In fact, election day voters on Democratic size higher than what the Republican election day voting is.

Also, I can tell you 18% of low propensity Republican voters voted compared to 4% on the Democratic side.

Those are the kind of analysis that we do.

So I've become very bullish on what the turnout looks like right now.

You got black vote that's actually lower than what it was in 2020, which is very problematic.

It's usually higher in early voting.

And so right now what you're seeing take place is a very, very strong Republican turnout in early voting.

And that has been driven, quite frankly.

We have invest, we got Republicans got shacked in 2008, and we have not been, we have invested heavily.

So you're seeing a 10 year investment program being played out.

It's been an ongoing elevation, highly, highly data based, highly technology based.

It's not as much as the boots on the ground as it used to be.

And right now the numbers are bearing very strongly on the Republican side.

- So you're saying- Remember that's the strategy.

It was- It wasn't just, let's get more people to vote early.

The plan was let's get more people to vote early, then we can focus our attention on the people who might not vote at all.

- Absolutely.

- And get them to vote late in the early voting or on election day.

So we will know either election night or closely afterward whether that plan works.

- So you're saying you believe the Republican election day vote is still there en masse, that this early voting is a return on an investment from years ago.

- Keep in mind, every voter has a unique voter ID number and the State Board of Elections post who votes.

It is a very simple process to determine who has voted and who has not voted.

Also, we know who the early voters are and we know who the election day voters are.

I mean, it's a very simple program.

And right now, I mean, I can tell you that Republicans are not cannibalizing their election day turnout.

And we've not seen, and there's a myth that Republicans don't like to vote early.

No, we have invested heavily in early vote.

We have our vote goals that we want to achieve in early voting.

We have our election day vote goals.

Right now, we're exceeding our early voting vote goals.

- With you guys representing each party in consulting, do you see the numbers the same way?

Or do Republican and Democrat consultants see numbers differently?

Because that's a part of this, that ordinary voters and ordinary folks like us, we don't ever get to see that.

Do you see numbers differently than Paul if you're looking?

And you guys are fighting head-to-head, say, for US Senate in '26.

- Yeah, listen, I think one of the things, the reason Paul, and I respect Paul a lot and we agree on the data, we believe facts are facts.

Numbers are numbers.

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- We do look at them differently because we have different metrics and goals that we need to accomplish within our own number set.

But it's funny is Paul loves to tell a story that in 2020 on election night in the US Senate race, I called him right before the race was called and said, I knew when we hit a certain turnout number today that we were done based on everything.

And that's the first thing I said to him, rather than congratulations or anything, because we look at the numbers the same way and understand the way the trends are moving and what these numbers mean.

- I think the fact that Trump and Vance and Harris and Walz are here so frequently, like just hearing you all talk about the day-to-day data.

That'll drive on who's coming, who's trying to rally people to vote, especially when early voting is down in certain demographics.

- But let me underscore, no one should walk away thinking that one party has a land lock on North Carolina.

The fact is, is that with the unaffiliated voters, that both parties are gonna be at 30-30 in 2026.

They're gonna be at 40% unaffiliated.

And if you win a landslide election in North Carolina, that's 1.5 percentage points.

- Wait, a landslide is 52-48?

- Yeah, yeah.

You won't see a 52.

You may see it a 50-42, two for somebody else or whatever else.

Tom Tillis won two US Senate races, never clipped 50% yet.

That's the dynamics of this state.

We are a state, the presidential race right now, say I'm bullish, but keep in mind, being bullish in the presidential race for Donald Trump means a 50 to 70,000 vote margin of victory.

- [Kelly] So, what do you?

- Out of 5.5 million or more voters.

I mean, think about that.

- Yeah.

- So what do you make of the Stein campaign's ability, at least in the "Carolina Journal" poll, to open up a 14 or 15 point lead in that race when you say 51-49 is where we should expect?

- Well, keep in mind, Josh Stein is the only candidate that I've seen in any polling, statewide candidate in North Carolina that has crossover voting.

He's getting double digit Republican support.

He's getting around 12 to 16% Republican vote, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, six to 7%.

We have, since both parties have gotten smaller, there's less crossover voting.

You have the behavioral Republicans, the behavioral Democrats or unaffiliated.

Those who were former Democrats, former Republicans, who left their party over the last 10, 20 years, they still, you know, have that allegiance there.

And then we have about a 12% swing class voting there.

Josh Stein is winning unaffiliateds by large margins, and he's also polling a double digit with Republicans.

That's not as much about Josh Stein.

It's more about Mark Robinson.

- Well, also, I mean the, you know, North Carolina voters chose Trump and Cooper at the same time, you know, like a, you know, a different margin.

And I mean, I think even in the primary before, you know, the way the gubernatorial race has gone, it was looking at, you know, maybe a barely Trump and then Stein.

And that was, you know, several months ago now.

- You know, the fact is outside the gubernatorial race, all of these races, the president, the statewide council state races, the judicial races, are gonna be really tight.

I mean, this is, as we're talking about the data, and we talked about the late deciders, they're gonna decide 'cause you're talking about 2 to 3 to 4% of the voters that when you're talking about a 50 1/2 to a 49 1/2 win or loss, for a lot of these candidates, you end up in a place where these late deciders are gonna have a huge impact.

- Paul's bullish on the Republican turnout, both early and on election day.

What do you as a Democratic consultant need to see out of Democratic voters in North Carolina to make you bullish?

- So I am bullish right now, and the reason I'm bullish is because I think that the closing arguments that the presidential campaign is making right now I think speak more to unaffiliated and independent voters that are true swing voters that have a real ability to move this race.

And the numbers so far are a little less than I want 'em to be, but again, I go back to when you go into the data, these are voters, the large majority, 85% across the board, Ds, Us, and Rs, voted in 2020.

So they're just voting earlier than they did.

These were bankable votes that were going to cast their ballots.

I think the real question as we get closer to election day, does that number of new voters tick up?

What are we seeing?

The one thing I'll say that I'm bullish about, Kelly, is that our new registrants that are voting that are different from four years ago are about six years on average younger than they were four years ago, and that's a good thing for Democrats.

- What do you make of unaffiliated voters as they register?

How predictable are the, quote, "independents?"

- Well, Paul and I laugh about this all the time, as everybody thinks if you're an unaffiliated voter, you're truly up for grabs.

- [Kelly] You're able to tell what I'm gonna do, right?

- Right, most unaffiliated voters are largely lean one way or the other.

The national parties, their brands have been in the tank for years, and so it's so easy to register as unaffiliated.

But the reality to it, most unaffiliateds lean one way or the other, and it depends on college education.

It depends on location, race, gender, whether you have kids in your house.

All of those things help us.

And Paul and I'll tell you, you might be an unaffiliated voter in suburban Wake County with two kids in public schools.

I know how you're gonna vote.

[panelist chuckles] If you're an unaffiliated voter in Randolph County who's non-college educated, I know how you're gonna vote too.

- And remember, North Carolina law makes it advantageous in some ways to be unaffiliated 'cause you could vote in either primary.

- That's right.

- You're not banned from one party or the other.

- One thing to understand is the way a gubernatorial campaign or US Senate campaign will operate is that everybody talks about polling, polling, polling.

We focus, Morgan and I focus on data analytics.

And the fact of the matter is is that the average voter today, we have six to 8,000 data points per voter.

And that's because of your search engine habits that you use with your phones.

It's because of your lifestyle, your purchasing habits.

And so unaffiliateds get scored.

Unaffiliateds get scored, those that lean Democratic, those that lean Republican, those that are hard R, those that are hard, and those that are pure swing.

And when you look at pure swing, you look at that issue set, and then you go to start that conversation with those voters.

But the fact of the matter is we know more today than ever before because of the probability models.

- Everybody's being watched.

- We are being watched, so.

Do you two know, from your perspective, camps already how unaffiliateds is or leaning in this state as who's moving in here?

Is it the New Yorkers bringing democratic votes here?

Is it Florida voters bringing red votes up?

How do you even get your mind around that?

- A lot of it depends on where you come from.

A lot of depends on where you end up.

If you're retiree and you're unaffiliated and you move, from regardless of where, and you move to Hendersonville or you move to Brunswick County, you're more likely to be a Republican.

If you are a college educated voter who's moving to the triangle or to Mecklenburg because your job has moved to North Carolina or corporate headquarters or a high paying job, you're more likely to vote democratic.

And it really, again, and Paul and I talk about this a lot, college education has become the best indicator of vote than race, gender, age, things that used to give you a better idea.

The truth is, college education points you more of how you're gonna vote than just about any other thing at this point.

- Dawn, let's talk about early voting as a process, after one week, you have a whole newsroom is covering this state.

Is it going fairly smoothly even in the west?

What's an update out there if you have one from your colleagues?

- Sure.

It seems to be going fine.

And then the legislature respect for one day to pass more Helene relief, 604 million, I think, which is way less than Governor Cooper asked, but it's not like it's the last bill.

But a separate bill they also passed was to add early voting locations in these disaster areas for people who like with, you know, transportation issues, everything else, just so they can get out there.

And there were a few Democrats that voted against it in the house.

I was in the Senate during the debate, which there wasn't any, everyone was fine with it, pretty much.

- We'll switch gears.

Still got one more week before the election, give or take.

So we'll re pick this back up.

I do wanna shift, folks, to the Helene recovery.

North Carolina leaders did approve another round of hurricane relief funding for Western North Carolina.

Lawmakers approved $604 million in new funding.

And by my math, the state has now allocated a total of $877 million, Mitch, from the rainy day funds Governor Cooper wants $3.9 billion, presumably right now to be funded.

Republicans say they'll assess the needs and requests before allocating funds, but they say they'll allocate funds.

Democrats say the effort's too little and too slow.

- I did wanna also just, again, extend our hearts and prayers to those in the west who have been dealing with this.

This has impacted a lot of folks in our communities.

And I've just gotta say another thank you as well to all those folks who, from across North Carolina and outside of North Carolina have stepped up to help the folks who have been so greatly impacted.

- I think we need more.

I don't think it's enough.

You know, and I think speed matters.

You know, we've gotta get people back in their houses as quickly as they can, as the weather comes down.

We've gotta get businesses up and going 'cause you know, Asheville is kind of the biggest city in the region and you know, people have different opinions about Asheville, but it certainly does drive the economic fortunes of the whole region.

- So, Mitch, just a little soft pivot towards partisanship.

It's not enough, it's too slow.

What do you make of Helene recovery from a policy standpoint?

I saw Republicans week and a half ago, very proud of their efforts, and the governor moved very quickly.

Now we have hundreds of more millions, but now we've gone from hundreds of millions to a $4 billion request, parse all of this information.

- Well, the interesting thing is that it's probably going to be something that North Carolina is dealing with well into the next legislative session, if not multiple legislative sessions.

And everyone who saw the damage and devastation from Helene says, "Okay, let's do something about it."

The problem is when you're talking about government and what government's supposed to do, there are a lot of things that you need to parse out.

Like, what is it that actually government should be doing?

And if it's government, is it the state level or the federal level?

Remember when they passed that first Hurricane Helene package, the $273 million, one of the things that legislators said is, "Look, "we don't wanna take steps now "that are gonna disqualify us "from what's supposed to be a huge amount of money "coming from the feds."

That's something keep to keep in mind too.

Plus, also remember, one thing that came out that was not Helene-related, around the same time that Governor Cooper came out with his $4 billion plan was the leading senator said, "Wait a minute, you're also asking us for $175 million more "for a hurricane that happened years ago "that some people still haven't gotten back "to their homes from.

"We've gotta fix some problems "with the way that you've dealt with past hurricanes," and that has to be something to be kept in mind as they're talking about hundreds of billions or billions more for Helene.

- Dawn, you were there.

- Yeah, a couple points with the Republican response.

You know, Senate Leader Berger told us, told reporters yesterday that, you know, Cooper didn't give him the ask, like, in in enough time.

You know, it was just a few days.

And they're not, I asked specifically, I said, "Is there anything in Cooper's proposal that's a hard no?"

And Berger said, "No, "it's just different things we haven't done "before that they need to think about."

So there's gonna be a future debate on small business loans versus small business grants.

Another thing in the senate, senate leader, excuse me, Senator Ralph Hise, a Spruce Pine Republican, who's one of the top budget writers, said that Helene is gonna dominate the budget process in the next legislative session.

So Mitch is right about this, and not just next year, I mean, several years and Speaker Moore, his worry is, you know, if you spend too much, allocate too much now, can we make sure that we get enough from the federal government?

So they're waiting on other factors now.

In the November post-election session, there's going to be more relief.

And Berger said even two weeks ago that he expects that to be the much larger bill and that, you know, I mean, that's just kind of how they are, at the ledge.

They don't want to spend money until they have to.

- You'll have our last word, but very quickly, within 30 seconds, what's the tone of the legislature as democrats, republicans and the governor work together on funding, whether they disagree on amounts?

- It's now, we're getting in the weeds on, like, with the small business loans versus grants, and that's where there's a lot of partisan split, where two weeks ago, it was very much a, you know, "We're all happy," like that.

"We're thankful for people's help and everything," and it's changing now.

It's getting more into the policy.

- Thank you, folks, for being on the show.

Thank you for watching.

Email me, statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'll see you next time.

Bye-Bye.

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