Carolina Demographics
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
We are sharing the testimony of Stacey Carless, the Executive Director of the NC Counts Coalition, who is testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform today on "Providing the Census Bureau with the time to produce a complete and accurate Census." The PDF version of her testimony is here. September 10, 2020 Chairwoman Maloney, Ranking Member Comer, and Members of the Committee: I am Stacey Carless, Executive Director of NC Counts Coalition. I…
It’s been almost four years since the 2016 general election and in that time, there have been demographic shifts in North Carolina. With just two months before the 2020 election cycle, we’ve broken down the changes by partisan composition and who makes up our newly registered voting population. First, we should note: our state’s population continues to grow North Carolina has experienced steady population gains since 2016, with net gains masking a larger turnover in…
As of July 25th, 2020, North Carolina had 7 million registered voters. Of these, 2.3 million or 33% were registered unaffiliated. This post examines the characteristics of NC’s unaffiliated voters. Age Younger voters are the most likely to register as unaffiliated. Forty-three percent of voters ages 18-34 are registered unaffiliated compared to 35% of voters ages 35-54, 26% of voters ages 55-74, and 21% of voters 75 and older. As a result, younger adults, especially…
Non-Response Follow-Up (NRFU) for the 2020 Census began nationwide on Tuesday, August 11th. Last week, the Census Bureau began releasing daily reports on total enumeration—the percent of housing units that have self-responded plus the percent that have been captured in NRFU —for the nation and all 50 states, DC., and Puerto Rico. This proportion ranges from 1.7% in Idaho to 29.1% in West Virginia. Based on these reports, North Carolina, and the southeast more broadly,…
As of August 18, 2020, nearly three in five North Carolina households had responded to the census online, by mail, or by phone (59.8%). This is below the national average of 63.9%. It is also below North Carolina’s self-response rate in 2010 (64.8%) by five percentage points, despite the two-and-a-half additional months of self-response compared to the last census due to coronavirus-related extensions. Every household that does not self-respond to the Census must be counted…
A few months ago, Carolina Demography's director, Rebecca Tippett, asked me to develop 100 detailed one-pager reports with over 120 data fields – one for each county in North Carolina. As a graphic designer, coding in a brand-new language seemed overwhelming, but the idea of entering 120 data fields on each page would have been time-consuming, opened up the possibility of transcription errors, and required hours of copyediting. So I spent the next few weeks…
More than four in every ten North Carolina households have not yet filled out the 2020 Census, representing more than 4 million North Carolinians not currently captured in the Census. Our current response rate is below the national rate and below where our state was in 2010. North Carolina communities that have not responded at high rates are predominantly rural, Black, and Brown, with low internet access. It is vital to our state that all…
A complete and accurate census count is incredibly important. The census shapes how billions of dollars in federal funding are distributed (including $43.8 billion to North Carolina), how political seats are apportioned, and how communities plan for their future residents. Historically, certain populations have been undercounted in the census, due to a variety of factors. In 2010, the Census Bureau estimated the census missed about 2.1% of the Black population nationwide. For young children, the…
Every household that doesn’t fill out the census form online, by mail, or by phone—known as “self-response”—enters the Census Bureau’s non-response follow-up (NRFU) universe. During NRFU, the Census Bureau sends trained enumerators door-to-door to collect census responses directly. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. NRFU was supposed to start in May 2020 but has been delayed due to COVID-19. The Census Bureau currently plans to begin NRFU operations in mid-August. To understand which communities this might impact, we examined shifts in the tracts with the lowest self-response (bottom 20%) and compared low response rates on March 20th with the lowest responding tracts as of May 17th. (The bottom 20% is a fluid group. The tracts in the bottom can change week to week as certain communities increase their response rates.)
NC Census Tracker Updates Visit the NC Census Tracker Sign up for email updates about the map and our weekly response rate analyses Presentations and Downloads 2020 Census: How is North Carolina Doing (April 22, 2020) North Carolina: Census 2020 Real-Time Response Rates – Week ending April 26 (PDF) County-Level Response Rates – Week ending April 26 New: NC college maps and tract data Note: The below analysis was done on 4/22/2020 with the self-response…