This is the second in a twice-weekly series of updates detailing pre-Election Day voter turnout across North Carolina in near real time, employing State Board of Elections data. New installments appear here on the Insight(u)s Blog on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons through Nov. 8th.

Part 2: Turnout Trends Through 10 October 2016

Again, please bear in mind: it’s still early days yet.

Completed and signed absentee-by-mail (ABM) ballots returned to the State Board of Elections reached 25,576 on October 10th. That’s down – by a lot – from the corresponding period in 2012 (just 79% of 2012’s action):

Viewed in isolation, this result should probably be taken with a grain of salt, since it might reflect as much (or even more) about the mechanics of when and how the Board of Elections tabulates returned ballots as it does the actual rate at which voted ballots are being submitted. But an abundance of other evidence suggests that the lag in ABM voting this year is real – and offers an explanation for why that’s the case.

Republican Voters are MIA

North Carolina’s registered Republicans simply aren’t voting (so far, anyway) in anything like the numbers they typically post. This is surely the most bizarre result we’ve ever seen in decades of poll-watching…but then, by any reasonable criterion this is also the most bizarre election year in modern history.

ABM voting is typically the almost exclusive domain of Republicans (as the red bars in the figure above – for 2012 – illustrate). Democrats typically prefer in-person Early Voting (which begins on October 20th this year). But this election, while both Dems and independents have posted modest upticks relative to 2012 (107% and 106%, respectively), Republicans are voting at just 55% of their 2012 numbers. And this ‘Trump slump’ fully accounts for the overall decline in ABM voting so far.

It’s hard to imagine a reasonable scenario in which the mere mechanics of vote tabulation by the Board of Elections could yield numbers like these, short of bizarre conspiracy theories.

Other North Carolina poll-watchers, including HuffPo, CNN, and the New York Times, have already reported that applications for ABM ballots by Republicans are down substantially this year in North Carolina (by 27%, according to the Times). As we show here, Tar Heel state Republicans are lagging even worse in terms of actually voting their ballots.

This is a trend that should scare the dickens out of the state’s incumbent Republican candidates including Gov. Pat McCrory, U.S. Senator Richard Burr, a gaggle of state legislators – and, of course, Donald Trump.

The Missing Republicans Are a Statewide Phenomenon

Might there be a simple (and boring) explanation for these bizarre results – perhaps something as simple as a glitch in ballot tabulation in one or two heavily Republican counties?

Nope, that’s not it. The map below compares voted ballot numbers by county across the state, for both registered Republicans (top panel) and Democrats (bottom panel). Counties in red are reporting decreased numbers of ballots so far from members of the indicated parties relative to 2012, while those in green are reporting increased numbers. And with the single exception of tiny Clay County, the board is red for Republicans pretty much statewide, while Democrats are seeing increased ballots in many counties, particularly in the state’s midsection where most of its voters live (Wake, Chatham, Orange, Durham, and Mecklenburg counties).

Is this the harbinger of a Democratic landslide to come, or just a momentary blip on the screen? Join us here again every Tuesday and Thursday, and we’ll just see about that.