2020 Absentee/Early Voting thread

[Lief 🗽]

WaPo: Early surge of Democratic mail voting sparks worry inside GOP

Of the more than 9 million voters who requested mail ballots through Monday in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa, the five battleground states where such data is publicly available, 52 percent were Democrats. Twenty-eight percent were Republicans, and 20 percent were unaffiliated.

Additional internal Democratic and Republican Party data obtained by The Washington Post shows a similar trend in Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

Even more alarming to some Republicans, Democrats are also returning their ballots at higher rates than GOP voters in two of those states where that information is available: Florida and North Carolina.

...

But several Republicans acknowledged privately that there is little upside for their party in the numbers — and said they are working feverishly to reverse the trend with a last-minute press with voters.

“It’s astronomical,” said one Republican strategist involved in Senate races who said he was “horrified” by the discrepancy and, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal concerns. “You see these numbers in a state like North Carolina, and how can you not be concerned?”

...

Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who is tracking mail voting trends on his website, the United States Elections Project, noted that in some states, the number of ballots cast is already approaching 10 percent of the vote total in 2016. He added that turnout this fall could surpass that of four years ago before Election Day even arrives.

In North Carolina and Georgia, for instance, 1 in 5 voters who have cast ballots didn’t even vote in 2016, McDonald said. Requests for mail ballot are up astronomically in dozens of states; the figure is 350 percent in Michigan, for instance, when compared with 2016.

In North Carolina, 17 times more people have requested ballots than four years ago; in Wisconsin, requests were up by a factor of 12, according to internal RNC data.

...

Republicans once carried an advantage in voting by mail. Ayres, the Republican pollster and a vocal critic of the president, said Trump’s rhetoric on mail voting has undermined decades of GOP work in the area.

“That’s what we do!” Ayres said with audible frustration. “We have made an art of tracking down people who would otherwise be reluctant to vote in person and getting them to use absentee ballots. It’s part of what we’ve done well in the past.”

He noted that the current GOP push for voters to cast absentee ballots runs counter to Trump’s rhetoric.

“I’ve seen these appeals to likely Republican voters — ‘Please apply for your absentee ballot.’ But it’s at the same time those voters are hearing from their president that mail voting is ripe with fraud,” he said.

[Lief 🗽]

The USPS stuff might have backfired on Trump. It looks like it scared a lot of Democrats into sending their ballots in as early as possible.

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California's already at 5% turnout.

https://twitter.com/Political_Data/status/1316150902365941761

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Lina Hidalgo is a hero, looks like Harris County has done exceptionally well despite the GOP state government’s open hostility to voting. She will be a great governor one day.

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Wow.
https://twitter.com/winwithjmc/status/1317037625845436417?s=21
https://twitter.com/winwithjmc/status/1317041464938012672?s=21

[Lief 🗽]

Wow

https://twitter.com/TexasVC/status/1317279285900693504

[Lief 🗽]

Pure speculation here, but I wonder if we're seeing a sort of psychological phenomenon in Texas and Georgia where suddenly low-propensity voters who thought their vote wouldn't matter in either state are going to turn out in huge numbers because things look much closer this election. I'm not sure how you'd go about proving that, admittedly.

I can't speak much to TX other than its population is booming, but GA's automatic voter registration system began in January 2017 and has now had nearly 4 years to propagate.

It's technically quasi-AVR since it is done via the DMV: poorer people (who are of course low-propensity) are more likely to renew their licenses every 5 years as opposed to 8 due to cost. That of course means the vast majority of these individuals are now registered to vote when they might have not been otherwise. Georgia active registered voters are now 95% of VEP (including inactive RVs, 102%). Even in 2018, the effect of AVR would have only been half as strong as it is now.

How did they manage to trick the GOP-controlled state government into implementing AVR??

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There's a better chance of Biden winning Denton outright than Trump coming anywhere close to those numbers.

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Weird that weekend voting is slower than weekday. Who are all these people who have a free hour to vote during the week but not on the weekend?

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Rough day for Democrats in Florida, though I guess we’ll have to see what happened in Miami-Dade.

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Hopefully NV Dems make all-mail voting permanent after this (I believe it was only this year due to the pandemic). This turnout is insane so far.

[Lief 🗽]

What do people make of the Colorado turnout numbers?  They look horrendous for Republicans so far.  Cory Garner is definitely losing.

Democrats   380,589
Republicans   207,086
No Party Affiliation   311,269

Yeah, Colorado is probably one of the few places where this year is pretty much like every other year, correct? These #s look horrific for the GOP.

Yeah.  Republicans keep saying "ground game" over and over again but in states that are basically all mail ballots like CO, NJ, etc., their numbers are horrible.  And Colorado has what was supposed to be a battleground senate seat, at least it was when Republicans were building this allegedly amazing voter turnout operation.  

I'm starting to think the red wave ground game talk is just yet another con from the party of pathological liars.

In my experience, ground game is mostly useless in high profile races and campaigns who say their ground game is going to have a major effect on the race are full of sh[inks]. And this is true of both parties (remember when Bernie’s army of volunteers knocking on thousands of doors a day was easily swept aside by Biden’s non-existent campaign?).

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Why are these great lakes swing states having so much trouble having the count mostly complete on election night when it seems like pretty much all the sunbelt swing states are going to have the votes counted on election night? I don't know if it's the GOP since most of these sunbelt states are and have been under GOP control for a while.

Well this is the first year that counting ballots ahead of time has been a partisan issue. This is also the first year that most Midwestern states are doing mail-in voting on a large scale, so there are kinks to work out that don't exist in the Sun Belt states that have more experience with it.

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Gonna need to move NV to “Safe D” soon.

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Really ugly numbers in Florida. Let’s see if the Obama rally this weekend can turn things around but it may be time to consider redirecting resources to GA and TX.

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...

The next few days are going to be compared with what were the final days of early voting in past years, right? Since there's a week extra this year?

[Lief 🗽]

Obama is holding a rally in Miami this weekend. We'll see if that plus souls to the polls on Sunday is enough to close the gap, but otherwise the Biden campaign needs to start thinking about redirecting resources to winnable states.