The
Guardian view on America’s choice: Don’t vote for Trump. Elect
Clinton
Editorial
Electing
Donald Trump would mean conservatism off the leash, a deepened racial
divide and a less safe planet. America and the world deserve better
Monday 7 November
2016 16.34 GMT
It is make your mind
up time for America. A hopeful, incrementally better,
boats-against-the-current United States; or a US flirting with a
dystopia from the pen of a Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy? A serious
but flawed Democratic candidate; or a Republican whose election would
be the sum of all fears? That’s the choice, the only choice, on
offer.
If we had a vote, we
would use it to elect Hillary Clinton as president on Tuesday. She
has a thoughtful and ambitious policy agenda for America’s
inequalities and injustices. She has an internationalist outlook. She
has responded to concerns about her cautious centrism by committing
to more radical plans. She is eminently prepared and qualified for
the job. She is a fitting successor to Barack Obama. And it is high
time there was a woman president.
To these can now be
added the fact that, as of Sunday, she is no longer under
investigation. The announcement, just over a week before polling,
that a new batch of emails was being investigated was, at best, an
extraordinary misjudgment by the FBI director James Comey. It
triggered nine days that needlessly shook US politics, narrowed the
polls and may have shaped the election. Now the bureau has said Mrs
Clinton will face no further investigation or charges over her use of
a private email server. Mrs Clinton bears a share of responsibility
for bringing this storm on herself. But the essential fact is that
she is in the clear.
The thing that
stares Americans in the face on a close-fought election day, however,
is that the only alternative to Mrs Clinton is Donald Trump. It needs
to be said again, at this fateful moment, that Mr Trump is not a fit
and proper person for the presidency. He is an irascible egomaniac.
He is uninterested in the world. He has fought a campaign of abuse
and nastiness, riddled with racism and misogyny. He offers slogans,
not a programme. He propagates lies, ignorance and prejudice. He
brings no sensibility to the contest except boundless
self-admiration. He panders to everything that is worst in human
nature and spurns all that is best.
Mrs Clinton is far
from perfect. But Mr Trump plumbs the depths of imperfection in ways
that have no precedent in frontline modern American politics. All
countries from time to time produce leaders who are ignorant or vain
or who lack intellectual judgment or personal grace. But Mr Trump is
the first candidate to get so close to power who has no experience of
the practicalities of politics and government, and who does not seem
to care about them either. If he is elected president it will send
the worst possible message to America about itself, and an even worse
one to the rest of the world.
There are three
particular ways in which electing Mr Trump is a step that should be
spurned by any responsible American voter. First, it would mean a
rightwing president governing with a rightwing Congress. Mr Trump and
the Republican establishment have many differences, but they would
find no difficulty cutting taxes for the richest or sparking an
aggressive trade war with former partners. They would ensure, as a
priority, that the conservative majority is restored on the supreme
court. Progress on civil rights and equality would be thrown into
reverse. Abortion rights would be under threat.
Second, Mr Trump’s
election would be, and would be seen as, a victory for white America
over African, Hispanic, Asian and other American ethnic groups. In
this campaign Mr Trump has campaigned against migrants, insulted
Muslims, stereotyped black people and disrespected Mr Obama at every
turn. He has been backed by every white racist in the land. Race
remains America’s deep foundation sin, and Mr Trump will deepen it.
Finally, electing Mr
Trump will make the world an even less safe place. It will threaten
US commitment to international institutions, including the UN, and
support for international norms. It will contribute to instability
and set back efforts to solve environmental problems. It will
encourage autocratic leaders in places like Russia, China, Turkey,
North Korea and elsewhere. It makes the nurturing of the planet more
difficult and the future of the human race more uncertain.
For all these
reasons, Americans should summon a special level of seriousness and
display a profound responsibility when they go to the polls. Anything
other than a vote for Mrs Clinton is a vote for conservatism off the
leash, a deepened racial divide and a more dangerous planet. The time
for messing is over. America deserves much better than Mr Trump. So
does the world. Mrs Clinton is much better. So elect her.
Record-breaking
early voting fuels Democratic optimism
More
than 46 million votes have been cast before election day.
By KYLE CHENEY AND
KATIE GLUECK 11/8/16, 4:56 AM CET
More than 46 million
votes have been cast in advance of U.S. Election Day, breaking
records in state after state and suggesting the prospect of a
heightened Hispanic turnout that could upend politics in several
battleground states.
While there’s no
way to know whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is ahead, the
available data about who has voted so far, and where, provides some
insight into what the results might hold. There are signs of an
unusually diverse electorate, marked by robust Hispanic numbers in
places like Florida and Nevada. Women seem to have turned out in
disproportionately high numbers in some states. In others,
Republicans appear to have made late gains.
Here are five
storylines that have emerged from the early voting period:
A Latino turnout
surge
Democrats had been
muddling through the early voting periods in Nevada and Florida. Then
in the final days, black and Latino voters flooded polling places,
fueling Democratic optimism in both states.
“Just since last
week, the percentage of the electorate that’s white has gone from
71 then over the last few days from 68.6 to 68.0, to 67.4, to 68.8,”
Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale wrote in an early vote
analysis on Monday. “Since Thursday, there has been no day when the
electorate has been more than 61% white. This is the Clinton recipe
for winning.”
Through last
Wednesday, according to University of Florida early vote expert
Daniel Smith, more than 429,000 Hispanic voters had cast ballots at
in-person voting locations. That’s a 158 percent increase from the
same period four years earlier.
And Nevada – once
considered one of the most Trump-friendly of the battleground states
– may be out of reach for Republicans on Election Day. Surging
Latino turnout in populous Clark County – where some polls stayed
open hours passed their closing time to let voters in line finish
casting ballots – helped drive up the Democratic vote margin over
the weekend, if Trump is doing as poorly among Latinos as some polls
suggest. That Clark County scene prompted an angry rebuke from state
GOP chairman Michael McDonald at a Trump rally Saturday. McDonald,
opening for Trump, said the polls were kept open late “so a certain
group could vote.”
The African American
vote in North Carolina is a different story. There, analysts say that
black voters have been disproportionately affected by restrictions on
early voting and a tightened early vote schedule. Still, black voters
managed to narrow the disparity with 2012 turnout in the final days
of the race, comprising increasingly bigger shares of the total
ballots each day.
An uptick in
unaffiliateds
It’s a nearly
universal trend.
Unaffiliated voters
made up a greater and greater share of the early electorate across
the country — in particular in North Carolina and Florida, in an
election where the nominees of both major parties face sky-high
unfavorable ratings. In North Carolina, through Thursday, a quarter
of the votes cast were from unaffiliated voters, up more than 40
percent over 2012 totals at the same time, according to data posted
Sunday by Michael Bitzer, an expert on the early vote at Catawba
College.
In Florida,
according to Schale’s number-crunching, voters without party
affiliation made up about 22 percent of the vote through Monday
morning. That’s about 1.4 million votes.
While that
development makes it harder to divine which candidate is leading,
Michael McDonald, an early vote expert who runs the U.S. Elections
Project, said there are signs that Clinton stands to gain at least
some from unaffiliated voters. Many of them, he noted, are younger
and members of minority communities — constituencies that lean
left.
“In Florida, part
of this has to do with age,” McDonald said. “Younger people tend
not to affiliate with a party. In Florida, Latinos tend not to
affiliate with a political party.”
In North Carolina, a
surge of white women hitting the polls has included many who don’t
affiliate with either party, a potentially worrisome sign for Trump,
who faces an enormous gender gap.
A New York Times
Upshot/Siena analysis found Clinton leading with unaffiliated voters
in North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania.
“You can look at
these demographics of these folks, I can tell you for sure it’s not
a surge of older white men making up the unaffiliated,” McDonald
said. “In comparison to 2012, there’s more white women than white
men among unaffiliateds, and African-Americans, there are some, and
other persons of color. Don’t think of these as monolithically
white males, that’s wrong, don’t think of them as independents,
because independents tend to break more Republican than
unaffiliateds.”
“This now adds a
big monkey wrench into trying to do the forecasting,” he said,
“Which way are the unaffiliateds going to go?”
Republicans came
alive near the end
It might be too
little too late to change the electoral calculus, but the GOP has
shown late signs of life in states expected to go to Hillary Clinton.
They’ve overtaken Democrats in Colorado. They were ahead of pace in
North Carolina and limited Democrats’ advantage in Florida from a
greater 2012 edge.
In other words, last
month’s bombshell FBI decision to reopen the review of Hillary
Clinton’s handling of classified information appeared to have
stoked more Republican enthusiasm—or at a minimum, coaxed some
reluctant Republicans to rally behind their nominee. And FBI Director
James Comey’s Sunday announcement that he stands by his decision
not to bring charges against her came too late to change the early
vote math.
In Colorado, where
Republicans were expected to hold an early voting lead as they did in
2012, Democrats consistently held an edge over Republicans until this
past weekend. Democrats began last week with a 31,000 vote lead in
ballots returned but by Monday morning, Republicans had surged ahead
by 7,000.
In Iowa, Democrats
had been building their early vote lead as well, clawing their way a
bit closer to their 2012 edge of 68,000 votes. But over the last
week, that growth stopped abruptly. Last Monday, Democrats led by
about 43,300 in votes returned. By the day before Election Day, that
edge had shrunk slightly to 41,900.
Women are dominating
the early vote
Up and down the
Eastern seaboard, women are voting at disproportionately high rates,
and are outperforming their 2012 turnout numbers. Close observers of
the vote in places like North Carolina, Georgia and Florida believe
that many of the women voting early are supporting Clinton — or at
a minimum, opposing Trump, who confronts a yawning gender gap.
In Florida,
according to numbers provided by the University of Florida’s Daniel
Smith, women comprise about 52.8 percent of the electorate, but 56.5
percent of the population that’s voted by mail, and 53 percent of
the early in-person vote. Overall, they’ve contributed about 55
percent of the state’s early vote as of Thursday.
Florida has expanded
its access both to voting by mail and, in many counties, in-person
early voting since 2012, but by both measures the female vote is up.
By comparison, 45 percent of the early in-person vote comes from men,
and 42 percent of the mail ballots are from men, both slight
downticks from 2012.
“If we take a
closer look, where we’re really seeing women overperforming is
among Democrats and no-party affiliateds,” Smith said. “I think
that’s largely a function of the Trump effect. If there’s anyone
who’s energized by not having Donald Trump be president, it’s
women and minorities, especially Hispanics. I think that’s where
we’re seeing the real bump from 2012 in participation.”
White women are also
voting at higher rates in states like Georgia and North Carolina,
McDonald said.
In North Carolina,
which has especially good data available, there were 55,050 more
women overall who had voted five days out from Election Day than
there were in 2012, he said. As of Sunday, votes from women made up
55 percent of all votes cast so far in North Carolina, according to
Catawba College’s Bitzer. Of that total, 46 percent were registered
Democrats, 30 percent were registered Republicans and 24 percent were
unaffiliated.
The Democratic
female vote total was expected to continue to rise as Democrats
sought to compensate for restrictions on early voting that, experts
say, disproportionately affected more liberal-leaning areas.
There is also good
news for Republicans: As of Thursday morning, there were 44,578 more
Republican women than in 2012, while the Democratic number was around
6,900.
As for unaffiliated
women in North Carolina, there were around 90,000 more than the
number who voted in 2012 as of Thursday.
2012 déjà vu
The shape of the
2016 early vote has more than a passing resemblance to 2012. That’s
good news for Democrats but bad news for anyone — including Trump —
who expected a dramatic reordering of the electoral vote landscape.
“The map looks a
lot similar to 2012 and if Trump’s going to pin his hopes on the
election, it’s got to be that he’s got a large number of
Democrats voting for him,” said McDonald of the U.S. Elections
Project.
That’s because
early voting patterns in states like Florida and Nevada — both of
which Obama won in 2012 — resemble those of four years earlier.
This time around,
Democrats held a crushing 73,000 vote lead in Nevada’s Clark County
– the heavily Democratic population center that includes Las Vegas
— when early voting concluded. That’s greater than Obama’s 2012
edge there, a huge cushion against modest GOP leads in the more rural
areas of the state.
Even Florida, the
quintessential swing state, is returning to form. After two weeks of
early voting (which ends this Sunday) and more than 6.4 million votes
cast, Democrats barreled past Republicans in early votes over the
weekend and ended with a lead of just over 1 percentage point. Schale
noted that his own model predicting the state’s raw vote count
recently produced a dead tie.
Like Florida, Ohio
is close, and still a mystery. While Trump has held a modest but
consistent lead there in polls, an overhaul of the early voting
schedule — and Ohio’s lack of traditional party registration
methods — prevents a clear comparison with 2012. Democratic turnout
slipped in crucial strongholds like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County,
giving hope to Republicans who say Clinton lacks enthusiasm in the
crucial swing state.
But Democrats note
that Ohio has eliminated “Golden Week,” an early vote period that
allowed residents to register and cast ballots at the same time. That
may have pushed more reliably Democratic voters to turn out later,
they argue. And by the end of the day Monday, early voting in Ohio
eclipsed by 11,000 the total early vote in 2012. In all, 1.8 million
ballots have been cast, and Democrats say they’ve made up ground
they lost in Cuyahoga with a surge in voting in Franklin County,
which includes Columbus.
In North Carolina,
Democrats are nervous that flagging African American turnout could
keep the state in the Republican column for the second straight
presidential election. Clinton has consistently led by narrow margins
in most polls of the state, but African American early vote turnout
fell nearly 9 percent off its 2012 pace.
Clinton allies argue
that’s a direct result of efforts to limit early voting
opportunities in the state’s urban areas – McDonald says North
Carolina is the only Southern state keeping track that saw a decline
in African American participation.
In Iowa, one of
Trump’s stronger battleground states, Democrats have nudged their
totals a little closer to their early vote margins in 2012, when
Obama carried the state. Democrats led the early vote turnout by
about 42,000 votes as of Sunday morning — down from a 68,000 vote
edge they had heading into Election Day 2012 but one that has tracked
steadily upward since mid-October until plateauing last week.
Authors:
Kyle Cheney and
Katie Glueck
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