Impact of Wake County Elections Bill: Partisan Index for Wake County Commissioner Districts | Eastern NC Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Jim Stirling.

    House Bill 99 looks to modify Wake County Commissioners elections from partisan and countywide to non-partisan elections and by district. This proposed change has caused some to exaggerate the impact of the bill. So, what do the numbers say?

    Utilizing the Wake County 2022 election data on the State Board of Elections website, I created a composite data set for 2022 statewide elections alongside the Wake County sheriff's race. Comparing the combined election results, we see that moving to district elections would only put two of Wake County's seven county commissioner districts in somewhat close elections.


    Only districts 2 in southeastern and 6 in northwestern Wake County would move to competitive elections. That is in line with what we see when analyzing composite data through Dave's Redistricting. The change would move all Wake Commissioners' seats from their current safe Democrat rating of D+11.