US 2020 election could have the highest rate of
voter turnout since 1908
Data from the US Elections Project predicts a record
150m ballots, representing 65% of eligible voters, for this election
Joan E
Greve , Maanvi Singh and agencies
Sat 24 Oct
2020 01.51 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/23/us-2020-election-highest-rate-voter-turnout
More than
50 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with 11
days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout
in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Friday.
The
eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between
Republican Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, as well as
Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has
killed more than 221,000 people across the United States.
Many states
have expanded in-person early voting and mail-in ballots ahead of election day
on 3 November, as a safer way to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.
The high
level of early voting has led Michael McDonald, the University of Florida
professor who administers the US Elections Project, to predict a record turnout
of about 150 million, representing 65% of eligible voters, the highest rate
since 1908.
In Texas,
the level of voting has already surpassed 70% of the total turnout in 2016. In
Georgia, some have waited in line for more than 10 hours to cast their ballots.
And Wisconsin has seen a record number of early votes, with 1.1 million people
having returned their ballots as of this week. Voters in Virginia, Ohio and
Georgia have also seen long lines at early voting sites.
The
pandemic has upended campaign traditions and its effects are still being felt.
Americans may find themselves waiting days or weeks to know who won as election
officials count tens of millions of mail-in votes. Democrats are encouraging
supporters to vote early – either in person or by mail – amid fears that the
United States Postal Service (USPS) may not have the capacity to deliver mail-in
ballots to election officials on time.
Ongoing
Republican efforts to restrict which votes are counted and how have also
worried voting rights advocates. This week, the supreme court allowed Alabama
officials to ban curbside voting. The Iowa supreme court also upheld a
Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending
thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to
correct voter applications with omitted information.
Michael
Herron, a government professor at Dartmouth and Daniel A Smith, a political
scientist at University of Florida, calculated that thousands of ballots in the
swing states of Florida and North Carolina have been flagged for potential
rejection due to signature defects. “Racial minorities and Democrats are
disproportionately more likely to have cast mail ballots this election that
face rejection,” they wrote in the media outlet the Conversation.
Trump and
Biden met on Thursday night for a final debate ahead of election day, with Snap
polls taken afterwards showing a majority of viewers believed Biden had the
better showing.
Lagging in
national polls, the president has been keeping a busy schedule of rallies,
although with many voters having cast their ballots already, it’s unclear what effect
the push will have.
On Friday,
the president held events in the battleground state of Florida, where opinion
polls show a tight race and over 4 million votes have already been cast,
approaching half the total four years ago.
When Trump
asked the crowd how many had voted, “nearly every hand” went up, reported NBC’s
Shannon Pettypiece, who was at the event.
Next week
Trump will head to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and, somewhat
surprisingly, Nebraska. He won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by less
than 1 point in 2016, and recent polls show Biden pulling several points ahead
in the battleground states.
Biden,
meanwhile, delivered a speech in his home state of Delaware on his plans for
leading a recovery from the pandemic. Biden’s speech comes as the US has hit
its highest single-day coronavirus case count since late July, reporting 71,671
new cases yesterday.
“This
president still doesn’t have a plan,” Biden said. “He’s given up. He’s quit on
you. He’s quit on America.”
Echoing his
comments during Thursday night’s debate, Biden said he would not shut down the
country in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m not
going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m
going to shut down the virus,” Biden said in Wilmington.
Warning flare’: New swing-state data shows
massive Democratic early-vote lead
In a worrisome sign for Republicans, Democrats are
also turning out more low-frequency and newly registered voters than the GOP.
By MARC
CAPUTO and ZACH MONTELLARO
10/23/2020
04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-numbers-swing-states-431363
Democrats
have opened up a yawning gap in early voting over Republicans in six of the
most crucial battleground states — but that only begins to tell the story of
their advantage heading into Election Day.
In a more
worrisome sign for Republicans, Democrats are also turning out more
low-frequency and newly registered voters than the GOP, according to internal
data shared with POLITICO by Hawkfish, a new Democratic research firm, which
was reviewed by Republicans and independent experts.
The turnout
data does not mean Donald Trump will lose to Joe Biden. Both sides are bracing
for a close race and a giant wave of Republicans to vote in person on Nov. 3.
Yet the turnout disparity with new and less-reliable voters has forced
Republican political operatives to take notice.
“It’s a warning flare,” said veteran Republican
strategist Scott Reed.
“Some
Republicans are stuck in a model that we always run up the score on Election
Day to make up the difference,” Reed said. “I think running an election in a
superpolarized electorate, you want to win early voting. Let’s go. Let’s stop
talking and making excuses.”
The GOP
caught an encouraging glimpse in Florida on Tuesday, when more Republicans
began casting in-person, early ballots than Democrats in Trump’s must-win
state. But Democrats have dominated voting by mail and on Thursday held a
historic lead in total pre-Election Day ballots cast of 463,000, or 10
percentage points, according to the state’s Division of Elections. Gov. Ron
DeSantis this week urged Republicans to vote early in person, a message Trump
plans to echo on Saturday, when he’s expected to call on his base to get to the
polls.
At a
glance, the top-line Democratic margins also look huge in Arizona (16
percentage points), Michigan (24 points), North Carolina (14 points),
Pennsylvania (46 points), and Wisconsin (22), according to the analysis from
Hawkfish, which is funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a Trump foe.
Though the
numbers look good for Democrats, they're not cause for complacency for
Hawkfish’s CEO, Josh Mendelsohn, who echoes Republicans in saying that he
expects high-propensity Trump voters to increasingly show up in force. Compared
with Republicans, Democrats are exhausting far more of their high-propensity
voters and the margins are expected to start tightening, as they have in
Florida.
"Democrats
are enthused, that's clear," Mendelsohn said, cautioning against a heavy
reliance on forecasting models showing the likelihood of a Biden win.
“I find
that folks want these models to be forecasts, and they want the forecasts to be
like a hurricane forecast and just to be perfect,” Mendelsohn said. “And it's
not, because it is like hurricanes, you've got a whole bunch of model tracks,
of which some are more reliable than others in certain circumstances.”
With 11
days left until the election, time appears to be Trump’s enemy more than
Biden’s.
“The
concerning thing for Republicans is that once a Democrat vote is cast, or once
a vote is cast in general, it can't be taken back,” said Chris Wilson, a top
Republican data analyst who independently reviewed the Hawkfish numbers for
POLITICO. “That to me is the bigger issue here: Our window to message and
convert any of these voters away from voting Democrat is shorter than the
number of days left in the campaign.”
Wilson
compared the situation to an analysis for a battleground congressional district
he has consulted for in which the Republican leads by a point, but Democrats
have poured it on so heavily in early voting that his candidate needs to win
Election Day by huge proportions.
“Great
news. We lead [in the polls]. But if you look at the early vote, we have to win
2-to-1 on Election Day,” Wilson said. “And that's probably just about every
contested race in America.”
While the
campaigns and consultants are monitoring the ballots counted by party, the
votes will not be tabulated until Election Day, and not every Democrat is
voting for Biden nor every Republican for Trump. With some variations,
battleground polling indicates each is pulling roughly the same number of votes
from his base when averaged out, but Biden has a slight edge among
independents, which could prove decisive.
With 47
million votes already cast nationwide in more than half the states, according
to the U.S. Election Project, and as many 100 million more or so to go, the
election is now being decided. But more than elsewhere, the presidency is
expected to hinge on these six states. (…) https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-numbers-swing-states-431363
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