Are North Carolina women registering to vote since Dobbs decision?

The theory that women voters would be animated by the overturn of Roe v. Wade is coming true in battleground states.

Targetsmart, a Democratic political data firm, found that 70% of people who have registered to vote in Kansas since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June are women. Kansas was the first state to directly vote on abortion rights since the Dobbs decision, but other states where abortion bans could resurface, like Michigan and Wisconsin, are also seeing more women than men registering to vote ahead of the November elections, and more people registering as Democrats.

“The results are truly remarkable and suggest KS wasn’t an anomaly,” Targetsmart CEO Tom Bonier tweeted.

What about North Carolina?

The North Carolina State Board of Elections updates voter registration demographics every week based on race, gender, and political affiliation. From June 18 (six days before the Dobbs decision) to August 13 (the last available data set), 28,317 voters have registered in North Carolina. Bonier noted that in North Carolina, women are outperforming men by a 7-point share margin among new registrants since the Dobbs decision. In a chart from Targetsmart, North Carolina had the tenth-largest gender gap between men and women who were registering to vote. Bonier notes that in states where abortion rights seemed more protected, there was less of a gap between the genders.

Despite this spike in voter registration, the data is less significant when compared across midterm years. From June to August 2018, women made up 41% of new registered voters, while men made up 35%. There are actually 1,200 fewer women voters overall at this point in 2022 than there were in the same 2018 timeframe. There are also a significant number of newly registered voters — 31% in 2022 and 24% in 2018 — that didn’t have their gender recorded at all.

The changes in North Carolina voters between 2022 and 2018 haven’t been nearly as significant as the jump from 2014 to 2018, when almost 168,000 women and 169,000 men registered in the four years between the midterms. Presumably, that increase is largely due to the Trump effect and the population growth over time.

This doesn’t serve as an indictment of North Carolina women, but likely says more about the immediacy of these other races. Kansas and Michigan had their primary elections on August 2. Wisconsin’s was August 9. North Carolina, meanwhile, had its primary election in May. Kansas, which saw a particularly large jump in voter registrations, doesn’t have same-day voting — meaning voters had to register by July 12 to have a voice in the election, adding an extra layer of urgency. North Carolina is also significantly larger than Kansas, and has a higher percentage of women to men.

While fewer women have are registered to vote this election, there are more registered voters at this time than there were in 2018, thanks to 7,720 men who have registered in the four years since. There are roughly 910,000 North Carolinians over 18 who haven’t registered to vote or are unable to vote for reasons like citizenship status or incarceration. In Kansas, about 12.5% of voting-aged people are not registered to vote, or roughly 280,000 people.

These numbers still have time to change before November. In the time since the Dobbs decision, state law has changed to allow people serving felony sentences on probation or parole to vote. We also don’t know how same-day registration at early voting will affect these numbers, or what percent of registered voters will actually go fill out their ballot. There also hasn’t been enough time to account for the recent 20-week ban on abortion, which occurred earlier this week and made the abortion issue much more real to women. It marks the first time since the Dobbs decision that North Carolina has seen a significant change in our abortion laws. Republicans and Democrats will be watching closely to see if it matters.