Introduction:

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 Presidential election between Joe Biden(D) and incumbent Donald Trump(R), it was clear that this election would be unique. With COVID-19 ravaging the United States and entire world, it grew increasingly apparent that early and absentee voting would play a crucial role in each campaign’s paths to victory. This assumption would be correct as the U.S. would not only see record turnout, but record absentee voting. Before 2020’s election day on November 3rd, many States had approached or surpassed their 2016 total turnout (U.S. Elections Project, 2020). By the end of the early voting period, about 101 million or 63% of American voters had voted early. This is an increase of about 51 million from 2016 (NBC News Decision Desk).

For the purpose of this research, absentee voting is defined as any votes that did not occur on election day to include mail and in-person early voting.

Absentee Voting and Trump:

With this drastic increase in absentee voting, one may expect campaigns to shift their messaging to encourage their supporters to embrace the method. Encouraging early voting may improve their position going in to election day and mitigate low-energy voters from finding any excuse to not cast their ballot day of.

This was not the tactic taken by the incumbent President Donald Trump in 2020. As the significance that absentee voting would have on the election increased, so too did President Trump’s anti-absentee voting rhetoric. An article from ABC News states that nearly half of Americans had expressed concerns about the security of absentee voting. This was a product of rhetoric from the former President like, “I think it’s subject to tremendous fraud” and the notorious claim of, “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do” (Karson, Cunningham, 2020)

Effect of Rhetoric on Turnout

This leads me to the primary focus of my research: Did former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric influence Republican absentee turnout in the 2020 and 2024 election? To look at this, I will explore data from North Carolina’s State Board of Elections. I will compare the overall absentee vote turnout between Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters. I chose to only explore the two major parties along with unaffiliated voters as they comprise a significant majority of voters in NC. I will explore the methods used to vote (in-person or mail) and I will compare the results from 2016, 2020, and 2024 general elections. I exclude fax and e-mail votes because they comprise less than 1% of all votes cast. I have chosen to include 2016 because it will show Republican mail-in voting without the treatment. While I believe the major impact would be felt on the 2024 election following Trump’s loss and claims of having the election stolen, I believe that Republican rhetoric influenced 2020’s numbers as well.

I will take the data at face value for this project. I believe that comparing both parties will control for any shifts not associated directly with Republicans views on absentee voting. I also argue that there is little to no measurable partisan advantage in overall early voting (Stein 1998). I believe that careful consideration should be granted to the method of voting when considering Trumps influence. Scholars have argued that mail-in voting has favored Republicans, and that his rhetoric regarding mail in voting since the COVID Pandemic has flipped that on its head (McDonald, 2024). This work attempts to show that this is true through data analysis.

With this in mind, I hypothesize that former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric negatively impacted the Republican parties mail-in turnout, but has not impacted overall absentee turnout.

Data Manipulation:

The code below demonstrates how I manipulated the data to create the graphics that I will include throughout the paper. I have included this code for the sake of transparency and to show that no manipulation of the raw numbers has occurred. I utilized the same commands for the data from 2016 and 2024.

nc_2020 <- county_2020 |>
  select(county_desc, voter_party_code, ballot_req_delivery_type, race, ethnicity, ncid)


party_nc_2020 <- nc_2020 |>
  filter(voter_party_code %in% c("REP", "DEM", "UNA"))

valid_delivery_types <- c("MAIL", "IN PERSON")
party_nc_2020 <- party_nc_2020 |>
  filter(ballot_req_delivery_type %in% valid_delivery_types)

summary_nc_2020 <- party_nc_2020 |>
  group_by(voter_party_code, ballot_req_delivery_type) |>
  summarize(count = n(), .groups = "drop")

Early Voting Data in North Carolina

Data

The bar graphs below represent North Carolinian early voting patterns broken down by party and type of vote. For this project, I have chosen to look at Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated voters as these parties make up the majority of voters in the state. I also limit the early voting style to in person and mail as alternative methods make up an insignificant share of the vote counts. These have been included simply as an additional way to visualize the information.

North Carolina Data by Party and Method

Comparison

To understand the differences between the 3 years of focus, I have created three different graphs that show how voting has changed in the state. The first shows the total number of early votes across the state.

Beginning in 2016, we can see that Democrats held a sizable advantage over Republican early voters. This advantage would carry into 2020, as all voting groups saw a similar increase in early voting. This was to be expected, as the COVID 19 pandemic had kept many out of polling booths with voters instead opting for some form of early voting to avoid the crowded precincts on election day. 2024 would see the democrats early voting fall significantly with both Republicans and unaffiliated voters out-pacing Democrat early voting. To see where this shift occurred, I break the data into two point plots representing mail and in-person early.

The first graph represents mail voting by party in North Carolina, and likely explains the Democrat drop off in 2024. As we can see, Democrats considerably outpaced both Republican and unaffiliated voters when it come to voting by mail in 2020. In support of my hypothesis, Republicans in 2020 saw an increase as expected due to the pandemic, but had COVID been the only variable one would have expected all parties to increase mail voting at around the same pace. The numbers clearly show that some other variable is influencing only Republican mail in turnout for 2020, and I argue that Former President Trump’s rhetoric is likely the cause. This carries over to 2024 as all parties saw a decrease in mail voting, likely a result of the pandemic essentially being behind the American People, but Republicans saw the lowest rates between the parties.

The Second graph shows in person early rates and, again, supports my hypothesis. Democrats held a sizable lead in 2016, but Republicans quickly closed the gap in 2020. This, I believe, was Republicans responding to the pandemic and utilizing early voting, but steering away from mail-in fear of election fraud. In 2024, Republicans embraced in-person early voting and out preformed Democrats.

This raises an interesting question for Democrats in North Carolina: Where did the votes go? While not a primary focus of this research topic, it is a question that should be addressed. I have attempted to answer this question by creating the following diagram:

This alluvial diagram utilized ncid matching between 2020 and 2024 to compare the early voters between the two years. As we can see, a majority of in person early voters from all parties continued to vote in person early. Mail played a much less significant role in the 2024 election as well. Of interest to North Carolina Democrats, however, is the number of people who voted early in 2016 that chose to sit out of the 2024 election. A sizable portion of the Democrat mail vote from 2016 moved to voting in-person early, but a sizable portion of those 2020 mailers also chose to sit out of the 2024 race. The Democrats also saw a larger number of in-person early voters sitting out than the other two parties. A limitation of the data should be noted here. As of the writing of this paper, I do not have the election day results from 2024, so some of this drop off could be explained by voters transitioning to day of. This is something that should be explored as more data from the election becomes available.

This diagram also supports the hypothesis presented for this work by showing how few republicans utilized mail voting in 2024. Of those republicans who voted by mail in 2020 and did not choose to sit out, the vast majority made the switch to in-person early with very few sticking with the voting method. This supports the idea of the Republican party doubting mail voting and embracing in-person early voting instead. Below, I have included an alluvial diagram that shows how the voters have moved from 2016 to 2024. Note that this only captures those voters who voted in all three elections.

Race

The final area that this work will discuss when looking at former President Trump’s rhetoric is how voters of different races have been influenced over time. To look at this, I created two point plots that show Asian, Black, and White voting patterns in the state:

The first graph (left) breaks down in-person early voters by race. There is a marginal increase from 2016 to 2024 for all racial groups aside from white voters. White voters saw a more pronounced increase from 2016 to 2020 and a sharp increase from 2020 to 2024. I believe that this is reflective of Republican rhetoric having an out sized impact on white voters in the state. For mail votes (right) we see the anticipated jump in 2020 across the races, but also a significant decline in mail voting in 2024. While I do argue that former President Trump’s rhetoric may have more impact on his core base of support in white voters, further analysis of the data will be required to support or dispel this assertion.

Conclusions

Overall, this work has attempted to show that former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had an impact on both the 2020 and 2024 elections. The United States has seen a shift occur in early voting numbers. It appears clear through this analysis that Republicans have grown skeptical of mail in voting and moved in favor of casting their ballots in-person. I support this assertion through the data presented in this work and primarily rest my argument on the fact that a disparity between Republican numbers and the other parties exist. Republicans vary significantly from the other two indicating some variable other than COVID which would have impacted all parties at the same rate. I argue that Trump’s rhetoric is the missing variable influencing the change in Republican voting trends. The in-person early strategy appears to have been successful considering the results of the 2024 election, and Republican in-person early voters out-pacing both Democrats and unaffiliated voters. For Republicans, I believe I have found strong support for the hypothesis presented. Unaffiliated voters also appear to be influenced in some way as is reflected in their radical increase in numbers for in-person early voting. As for the Democratic party, a combination of declining mail voting rates and only a slight relative increase in in person early voting could be one factor for the parties loss in 2024.

Further research on this topic should look at voters who transitioned from early to day of voting as that data becomes available. Race should also be a topic of further discussion as understanding how rhetoric impacts different voting demographics could produce a winning strategy for the party that is able to capitalize on tactics that work best for their core demographic groups. The race avenue may also be of interest to researchers in the field of sociology.

References:

Absentee and Provisional Data. NCSBE. (n.d.). https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/absentee-and-provisional-data

Karson, K., & Cunningham, M. (2021, July 21). “I don’t trust it”: Is Trump’s false rhetoric on vote-by-mail resonating? ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trust-trumps-false-rhetoric-vote-mail-resonating/story?id=71887848

McDonald, M. (2020, November). Early Vote Analysis for Sunday, Nov. 1. Early vote analysis for Sunday, Nov. 1. https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/Early_Vote_Analysis_11_01.html

Murphy, J. (2024, October 30). Early voting map: How to make sense of 2024 presidential election data. NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/2024-early-vote-data-map-rcna177666

Stein, R. M. (1998). Introduction: Early Voting. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 62(1), 57–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749718