In-person early voting in North Carolina is almost over. Have you voted yet?
North Carolina’s record-breaking in-person early voting period began on Oct. 17 and ends on Saturday, Nov. 2 at 3 p.m. If you’re reading this on Friday and you haven’t registered to vote and/or voted yet, you have about 24 hours left to register and/or vote early.
As of the time of this writing, more than 3.6 million North Carolinians have voted early. There are just under 7.8 million registered voters in the state. You can register to vote at any of your county’s early voting locations and then vote afterward – but your chance to register ends when early voting ends. North Carolina does not offer same-day registration on Election Day.
If you are able to vote then you absolutely should. This election is too important to sit out. Not only is wannabe dictator and fascist Donald Trump on the ballot, but his MAGA followers Michele Morrow, Dan Bishop, Hal Weatherman, Luke Farley and Mark Robinson are running for statewide seats in North Carolina. There are also plenty of right-wing extremists running to keep the Republican supermajority in the legislature and keep or gain seats on county school boards across the state.
Trump and his MAGA acolytes have been planning for a right-wing Christian Nationalist U.S. government takeover since President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump loyalists at the Heritage Foundation have created the Project 2025 agenda, which is the far-right’s blueprint for creating an authoritarian government with the stated goal of rolling back decades of social progress while making big corporations and wealthy Americans even richer.
As we highlighted in our memo a few months ago, if implemented, Project 2025 will affect North Carolinians’ taxes, health care, reproductive rights, education and beyond.
Here are just some of the ways Project 2025 will harm North Carolinians:
- Taxes – Under the Project 2025 plan, the tax burden would move from the wealthy to the middle class. A typical family of four in our state would see a tax increase of $2,713 per year while the 45,000 households in the country that report more than $10 million in income would see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.
- Health care – Around 911,500 North Carolinians enrolled in Medicaid would be at risk of losing coverage due to Project 2025’s proposed “limits or lifetime caps” on Medicaid benefits. The plan would also raise prescription drug prices for up to 662,600 residents here because the plan eliminates out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits.
- Reproductive rights – Project 2025’s elimination of emergency contraception medications from free preventative care requirements would result in 1.56 million women in North Carolina losing guaranteed access to free emergency contraception. The plan would also call on the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act to criminalize mailing medication abortion pills, which would essentially ban abortion in the U.S., even in states where it’s legal.
- Education – Just like Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Republican state superintendent candidate Michele Morrow, Project 2025 calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education. It also calls for abolishing Title I, which provides funding to ensure that schools serving low-income students have additional resources to provide the quality education all children deserve. Ending Title 1 would eliminate 6,417 teaching positions, which currently serve nearly 100,000 students in North Carolina.
The future of these same issues is also at stake in our statewide and legislative races. Republicans currently have a supermajority in the state legislature, but a few Democratic pickups would mean that if Josh Stein is elected governor (which looks exceedingly likely) then his vetoes of the far-right bills Republicans are likely to pass will be sustained instead of overridden, ensuring that reproductive rights aren’t eroded any further at the state level and public education dollars might actually go to public schools instead of exclusive private schools.
The outcome of this election will likely come down to a few thousand votes in some places. Everyone who is registered to vote and cares about protecting our democracy, standing up for reproductive, civil and LGBTQ+ rights, supporting commonsense gun laws, fighting against the impacts of climate change, and ensuring our country has a strong middle class and that all Americans have opportunities to succeed should vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. The choice couldn’t be clearer.
Election Day is Nov. 5. Polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. DO NOT LEAVE if you are in line when polls close – you are legally entitled to vote. Check out the ACLU’s Voting Rights website if you have any issues or concerns while voting. You can also call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
Important Voting Resources:
- Check Your Voter Registration Status
- View the List of Acceptable Photo IDs
- Track an Absentee Ballot
- Find Your Nearest Early Voting location
- Find Your Election Day Polling Place
- For Any Other Questions on Voting:
