Voters in Greensboro won’t be going to the polls this year on Nov. 7.

Greensboro began electing the mayor and city councilmembers to four-year terms in 2017. The current City Council should have been elected in Nov. 2, 2021, but the Census data needed for redistricting was late due to COVID restrictions and the state delayed that election until July 26, 2022.

So, the first four-year term served by the City Council was nearly a five-year term and the current four-year term to which the mayor and city councilmembers were elected in 2022 will actually be closer to a three-year term with the election in November 2025.

It actually didn’t make much difference because not a single incumbent candidate lost in the July 2022 election.

No election this fall means the voters in Greensboro can concentrate on the 2024 election, and while it seems like candidates have been campaigning for that election for a couple of years, the filing actually opens at noon on Monday, Dec. 4, and closes at noon on Friday, Dec. 15.

The statewide primary, which will have the presidential and gubernatorial race at the top of the ticket, will be held on Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

Voter turnout is largely driven by the top of the ballot, and it appears that in the North Carolina Republican primary voter turnout will be low because early polling shows that neither the presidential race nor the governor’s race are going to be close.

A statewide poll by the John Locke Foundation showed both former President Donald Trump and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson far ahead of their competitors two months out from filing.

For the Republican presidential primary, 51.8 percent of likely Republican voters said they would vote for Trump. That may not sound like a huge amount of support, but that puts Trump almost 40 points ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who finished second with 12 percent.  It doesn’t appear that all the charges filed against Trump have hurt his popularity with Republican voters in North Carolina.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nicky Haley was not far behind DeSantis with 10.4 percent and was the only other candidate to have double digit support.

In the Republican governor’s race, Robinson has an even larger lead than Trump. Robinson had the support of 48.6 percent of likely Republican voters, which is a 43.7 point lead over North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell with 4.9 percent. Former 6th District Congressman Mark Walker finished third with 4.1 percent.

One big difference in the polling for the governor’s race and the presidential race is that in the governor’s race 41.2 percent of those polled said they were undecided. But even in the highly unlikely event that all those undecideds ended up supporting one of the other candidates, it wouldn’t be quite enough to overcome Robinson’s lead, according to this early poll.

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