Carolina Demographics
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
As of Friday, October 9, 2020, you have until October 31, 2020 to complete the 2020 Census. This may change, however, depending up on the outcome of the administration’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. This decision may come as soon as Saturday, October 10. At present, the Census Bureau is reporting that 99.6% of North Carolina households have been enumerated (counted). We’ve gotten a few questions regarding this number and more recent news on…
A federal judge ruled that the Census count must be extended to October 31 and cannot end a month early. The order also extends the tallying process by four months, as originally requested by the Bureau in April. While an appeal is expected, as of now, the 2020 Census self-response deadline is October 31, 2020, not September 30. This is good news for North Carolina, because we have significant work to do to ensure a…
Note: As of today, September 22, 2020, the 2020 Census self-response period will officially end on September 30. This end date is still under deliberation, however, and may shift back to October 31, depending upon the outcome of an ongoing legal challenge. We have one more week to count all North Carolina households in the 2020 Census. Here's how North Carolina is doing as of September 21st: North Carolina's response is low compared to other…
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…
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