Chris Kromm says that the number of unaffiliated voters is growing.

The executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies says a closer look at voters who have registered in the last three months shows that a plurality are Democrats.

In a post on Facing South, he notes that 46 percent of the newly registered voters are Democrats, 37 percent are unaffiliated, and 17 percent are Republicans.

Meantime, 63 percent of the growth in North Carolina Democrats are black voters, who make up 45 percent of registered Democrats and 20 percent of the overall electorate.

Also, the number of voters who identify as Hispanic as grown by 10 percent, and "other" by 4 percent.

"Those two groups still represent a relatively small share of the state's voters -- 134,000 state-wide, or just over 2% of North Carolina voters. But in a close primary, that could make a difference," he writes.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center found the number of self-identified Republicans had dropped significantly since 2004.

Correction: The numbers in Kromm's post were wrong and have since been corrected.

The number of self-identified Republicans in North Carolina is dropping.

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, the number of North Carolinians identifying as Republican has dropped from 35 percent in 2004 to just 26 percent today.

Bush won North Carolina handily, 56 to 44 percent. 

"Of the large states Bush won by more than five points in 2004, North Carolina has seen the greatest drop in GOP identification," Pew's researchers wrote.

The interviews were conducted with registered voters during the first two months of 2008. Overall, researchers found that nationally, 36 percent identified as Democrats and just 27 percent as Republicans. 

Among voter registration, the number of independent voters has increased, Democrats have gone up slightly and Republicans are static.

In 2004, 46.8 percent of voters were registered Democrats, 34.5 percent were Republicans and 18.5 percent were unaffiliated, and two-tenths of one percent were Libertarian.

As of Saturday, 44.8 percent were registered Democrats, 34 percent were Republicans and 21.2 percent were unaffiliated. There are no registered Libertarians.

Hat Tip: Tom Jensen 

Jon Stewart's fans are a pretty knowledgeable bunch, but so are Bill O'Reilly's.

In an aside on a post yesterday about the Virginia Tech shootings, Durham blogger Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies argues that two WRDU radio hosts are ill-informed, perhaps because of what they watch:

maybe it's Fox News, which a recent Pew Center study found was the news source most likely to produce uninformed viewers (those most up on current events, Pew found, where watchers of The Daily Show and Colbert Report on Comedy Central).

But click through to that study and you'll see two things wrong with the summary:

* The audience for "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" was essentially tied with that of major newspaper Web sites, Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour" on PBS, "The O'Reilly Factor" on the previously mentioned Fox News Channel, National Public Radio and Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

* The study does not say that watching the show informed the audience, necessarily.

As the authors write:

The fact that a particular news source's audience is very knowledgeable does not mean that people learned all that they know from that source. As noted earlier, some news sources draw especially well-educated audiences who are keenly interested in politics.