Here’s what we’ve learned from this year’s elections

This week, we speak with Mike Rusher, who’s been analyzing elections data since 2010, about perspective on North Carolina’s 2020 elections.

Rusher is the vice president for public affairs at The Results Company, a communications and strategic consulting firm in Raleigh. During his career, he’s worked with nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, state government and governmental affairs. Rusher, the North Carolina Republican Party’s former chief of staff, began packaging election data tracking and analysis to his clients in 2010. He earned a degree in political science and concentration in state government from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

As the proverbial dust settles from the 2020 election, it’s worth spending some time reflecting on things like the big (N.C. voter turnout), the small (the razor-thin margin of the Newby-Beasley race for Chief Justice of the N.C. Supreme Court) and how we might look at elections differently looking ahead. Let’s start with voter turnout: N.C.’s was a record 75% — but only 16% of voters cast ballots on election day. As Nov. 3 came and went, what major reflections did you have as you watched and observed what was happening in N.C.?

While there was a noticeable shift in the way people voted this year — generally earlier than in years past — North Carolina as a state continued to generally prefer Republican candidates over Democratic candidates.

In 2020 there were 20 statewide contests; Republicans managed to win 16 of them, Democratic candidates won only four. To do this, Republicans managed to sweep all contested judicial seats and each of the open seat Council of State races. Governor Cooper’s visibility for pandemic coverage assisted his 4% margin of victory, though it is notable that Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler received the most raw votes of any statewide candidate. Though he was at the top of the ticket and won the state by a point and a half, there were seven other statewide candidates — six Republicans and Roy Cooper — who finished with more raw votes than President Trump.

You’ve written some analysis about the Paul Newby-Cheri Beasley race, which Beasley conceded two weeks ago. Newby, a sitting justice, was declared the winner over Beasley (who was seeking re-election as chief justice) by 401 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast — but not before lots of legal wrangling on her campaign’s part. How do you reflect on that race?

Not only was this one of the closest races in state history, it was also one of the most bizarre recounts from a legal standpoint. Chief Justice Beasley launched an unprecedented recount scheme that sought to add a list of more than 3,000 votes to the final election totals — a list that recount observers discovered was purged of all but a handful of Republican voters.

This led to embarrassing headlines from her campaign’s hometown Raleigh News & Observer, “N.C. Supreme Court candidate pushes to count more votes — if they’re from Democrats,” where the Beasley campaign declined to respond to such surprising conduct. After widespread criticism of this effort, nearly all county election boards tossed out these requests from the Beasley campaign and she later conceded before the final recount concluded. I think we can expect many future State Supreme Court races to be very close, but I think we can all agree that padding vote totals, post-election, is not something that should be repeated ever again.

When we think about — and talk about — elections, there’s typically not a lot of discussion, relatively, about the state Supreme Court races. Many voters don’t have a lot of familiarity with the candidates or the judicial issues involved. What impact will the Newby-Beasley race have on future races in the state’s high court?

Due to changes in election law, this was the first year since roughly 2002 that N.C. State Supreme Court candidates were listed on the ballot with their party of registration. While some criticized this move, it actually led to an all-time high for voter participation in judicial races.

Most folks tend to think an increase in voter participation is a good thing. To demonstrate this, we calculated judicial drop-off by counting up all votes in the Presidential contest, then compare that total to the number of voters in the N.C. Supreme Court contests — and there is historically a noticeable decline. For example, in 2004, there was a drop-off of 22.6% from Presidential to N.C. Supreme Court. In 2008, the drop-off was 28.3%. In 2012, 22.1%, and in 2016 the drop-off was 16.5%. Fast forward to 2020 — there was a drop-off of just 2.4% from the top of the ticket to N.C. Supreme Court. This is a win for Democracy.

This year, 65% of N.C. voters cast ballots in one-stop early voting and another 18% did so via absentee ballots. The COVID-19 pandemic and high interest in the presidential race each played an important role, of course. But what are your thoughts about how those numbers will look in future elections?

COVID really intensified North Carolinian’s continued biennial shift towards early voting, which really began back in 2008. The increase percentage of ballots cast early in 2020 was largely due to the increased participation of mail-in absentees.

To demonstrate this, in 2016 more than 65% of all ballots were cast before election day, while in 2020, more than 83% of all ballots were cast before election day. Mail-in ballots were just 4% of all ballots in 2016, that increased to 18% in 2020, a shift of more than 800,000 voters. People began voting by mail in September and as long as they were postmarked by election day, mail-in ballots were allowed to be counted all the way up to Nov. 12. COVID was the driving factor for the increase in voting by mail this cycle, and we should expect voting by mail to continue to be a large block of our method of voting. That means candidates will need to reach their potential constituents as early as possible.

What would you like to see change about the way we “do” elections in North Carolina — from campaigning to election spending to terms and term limits (should General Assembly terms be more than two years) to the actual voting process?

One of the first things that must be addressed in 2021 is the gubernatorial-appointed, highly partisan design of the State Board of Elections. Our election operators are selected, appointed and replaced solely by the governor. The elections board has become more partisan, and less transparent over the last four years and that’s bad for democracy. Most recently, the elections board changed the absentee ballot rules after hundreds of thousands of ballots had been cast through the mail. They negotiated a private settlement with a group led by Gov. Cooper’s 2016 election recount lawyer, and courts could offer little relief due to the tight time frame.

The bottom line is that the partisan state board overstepped its authority and rewrote election law, and lawmakers should address this.

I believe professionalizing elected state legislative jobs would also benefit North Carolinians. If a legislator is chosen to serve by their community, they are immediately expected to be on call essentially 24/7 but the paycheck is only $14,000 a year. This results in our public officials having to juggle their normal jobs with the daunting task of legislating and often causes well qualified citizens to forego running for office. This effort could be complimented with term limits, though we’ve seen pretty high turnover rates in the General Assembly over the last decade.