Durham has more than 240,000 registered voters. Yet in any given election, thousands of those voters stay home. Here at The 9th Street Journal we wondered just how many voters show up for every general election, year after year. The answer? Less than 2,000 people – just 1,934 residents — have voted in every Durham general election in the past 20 years.
Consistent voters have an especially strong voice in Durham’s municipal elections, because turnout in those elections remains stubbornly low. For the past decade, turnout in the city’s municipal elections has hovered below 20%. In all the municipal elections during that period, the roughly 2,000 people who vote in every election account for between 5-10% of total ballots.
The city’s most consistent voters — those who haven’t missed a single general election in the last two decades — include former elected officials and ordinary folks who are extraordinarily engaged. Mayors Wib Gulley (1985–1989), Nick Tennyson (1997–2001), and Elaine O’Neal (2021–2023) are on the list. So are City Council member Carl Rist, state Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls and former school board member Heidi Carter. The list includes Duke professors, professors from N.C. Central University, local activists and plenty of folks who are not household names.
These consistent voters differ from the average Durham County voter. Some 83% are Democrats, even though only about half of the county’s voters identify that way. Their average age, 72, contrasts sharply with the county’s average voting age of 46.
Nearly all of Durham’s most consistent voters are either Black or white — 42.6% and 55.3% respectively. Only three identified as Hispanic or Latino. None identified as Asian.
These differences may have emerged for several reasons.
First, our analysis looked specifically at those who have voted consistently for the past 20 years. Durham County, and the entire state of North Carolina, have experienced large demographic shifts since 2005. Between the 2010 and 2020 Census, Durham County’s Hispanic and Asian population increased by 38.9% and 46.4%. Hispanic and Asian voters now make up 5.5% and 3.9% of the county’s voters, respectively.
Second, the number of unaffiliated voters in Durham County has exploded recently, growing at a rate 7.5x faster than registered Democrats in the past 10 years.
Finally, Durham County is a highly mobile community, partly because it is home to multiple colleges, including Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and Durham Technical Community College. Students, a young and diverse population, generally tend not to stay in the area long-term.
We were curious to meet some of the voters who keep showing up at the polls, year after year. So we decided to sit down with some of them ahead of this year’s election.
Our profiles range from a former mayor to an activist, to the oldest living person in the state of North Carolina.
