Good morning!
From The Wash Po:
For candidates in tight races and the parties that fund expensive get-out-the-vote efforts, Election Day has turned into Election Month: By Monday, voters in 34 states and the District of Columbia will be able to cast ballots in person.
The success or failure of each party’s efforts to get voters to the polls early will determine the outcome of critical contests across the nation, including the battle for control of the Senate. Both parties have invested accordingly — and early data suggests the millions of dollars they’ve poured into those efforts are paying off.
In Iowa, where Rep. Bruce Braley (D) and state Sen. Joni Ernst (R) are fighting over an open Senate seat, more than 185,000 people had cast ballots by Friday — a far higher number than had voted by this time during the last midterms in 2010. More than 782,000 Floridians have already cast their ballots this year, a little more than one-third the number who voted early in 2010.
More than 100,000 voters have cast ballots in each of these three states: California, Georgia and Michigan. Over the weekend, early-vote locations opened in Nevada and New Mexico. And on Monday, voters will be able to cast in-person ballots in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, North Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, with three states slated to begin early voting on Tuesday.
Since the first ballots of the 2014 midterm elections were cast in early September, in North Carolina, at least 1.7 million people have voted in this year’s elections, according to public records compiled by Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Elections Project.
Not every state that conducts early voting makes its voting statistics public. Three states — Oregon, Washington and Colorado — will conduct their elections entirely by mail this year, and ballots have already been sent in all three states. Combined with incomplete data from other states, that means the total number of votes cast probably exceeds several million.
The higher-than-expected turnout, long before Election Day, suggests early predictions of dismally low turnout might be too pessimistic.
“There’s going to be high turnout, both in the early vote and on Election Day combined,” McDonald said.
This year, Senate Democrats have invested heavily in what they call the Bannock Street Project, a multimillion-dollar effort to register, identify and turn out what they call “drop-off” voters, registered voters who tend to show up in a presidential year but “drop off” in a lower-turnout midterm.
Getting those people to cast a ballot “is absolutely critical” for Democratic hopes of keeping the Senate, said Matt Canter, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “There’s a whole lot that’s critical to our efforts to hold the Senate. There’s no question this is one of the fundamental pieces, but we’ve been preparing for this for a long time.”
After the 2012 elections, in which President Obama’s campaign used early-voting windows to run up their vote totals long before November, Republicans also have redoubled their efforts to drive their supporters to the polls before Election Day. Americans for Prosperity, the grass-roots organization attached to the network of conservative donors including the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has invested $125 million in voter mobilization projects — money that is apparently paying off.
With incomplete statistics, it isn’t clear which party has the edge overall. But it is clear that in some areas, Republicans have maintained or improved on past efforts to turn voters out before Election Day.
About 43 percent of Iowa voters who have already voted are Democrats, a sign that the party is turning out voters who might otherwise have stayed home. But around 40 percent are Republicans, a dramatic improvement over the party’s performance in 2012, when just 32 percent of the early electorate was registered Republican, and 2010, when 38 percent of early voters were Republicans.
In Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott (R) and his opponent, former governor Charlie Crist (D), have invested heavily in canvassing operations, Scott deputy campaign manager Tim Saler pointed to early statistics that show Republicans making up 48 percent of the early-vote total, compared with about 35 percent for Democrats.
That’s a nearly identical advantage to the one Scott had in 2010, when Republicans outnumbered Democrats 49 percent to 37 percent among early voters. That year, Scott won election by just over one percentage point. Many Republican-leaning counties in Florida don’t open their early voting locations until Saturday.
In 2012, when Democrats outnumbered Republicans in early voting by almost 4 percentage points, Obama won Florida by less than one point.
With numbers that tight, it’s no shock that early voting has become the latest partisan battleground in state legislatures nationwide. Between 2000 and 2010, Democratic-led legislatures expanded early-voting hours in a number of states. And since 2010, Republican-led legislatures in eight states have curtailed the number of days or hours during which early voting can take place, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Republicans in Missouri advanced a ballot measure that would create a six-day window for early voting — the first time voters there will be allowed to cast a ballot in person before Election Day — after early-voting supporters threatened to put a measure requiring six weeks of early voting on this year’s ballot. Voters in Connecticut this year will decide whether to remove language from the state constitution that prohibits early voting.
Methods for turning early voters out to the polls vary by state. Some campaigns rent vans or buses to drive voters to polling places. Democrats have long used Sunday church services to turn out African American voters, a practice they call “souls to the polls.” Every campaign will spend the next two weeks knocking on as many doors as possible.
The public records showing who has voted and who hasn’t help campaigns focus on turning out voters most likely to back their candidates. Campaigns and party committees have spent months, and tens of millions of dollars, identifying their supporters. Once those supporters vote, the campaigns can cross them off the target list and move on to the next potential voter.
McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist, said the focus on getting people to the polls amounted to a grand experiment, one academics have been theorizing about for years. Democrats are working to change the electorate through a concerted focus on voter mobilization, and Republicans are aiming to make up in an area where they’ve fallen behind.
“This is what the election is going to come down to: Can Democrats overcome the turnout deficits they have among their key constituencies — young people, poor people, minorities,” McDonald said. “This is a huge experiment. This is something that political scientists and parties have been doing experiments on, voter mobilization, for the last decade. And this is being done on a big scale.”
*****
Readers: Let’s get the edge! The time is drawing near and we cannot rest on our laurels and expect miracles to happen unless we all get involved. That means everyone. We’ve done a good job and we’re now coming to the finish line. I know so many of you, like me, have given it your all for the past 6 years. I’m not going to give up now, and I know you aren’t either. This is the time where we must do more than we have ever done before or we will surely feel the repercussions of the right should they become the majority. And it won’t be pretty or a party.
This is about EVERYONE getting involved. Miracles will happen when we all do as best as we can. It is not enough to go to the polls and vote. We must encourage others to get there too, even if it means we have to pick them up and wait for hours in voting lines to make sure everyone casts their vote. Really, our effort is quite minimal when you realize the impact of our efforts, will be for decades to come. Let’s ensure that our efforts pay off for the Dems, so that our future will be promising.
Get to the polls and vote early, especially if you feel that it will be challenging voting on election day! And then help someone else get to the polls to vote.
What will you do to help people get to the polls and vote? Blog me.
Adolfo, Juanita, Sophia…et al: Right on. Thanks for taking the time to comment on the rest of the write that I personally didn’t address.
Bach: Thanks for reading for six years and for posting your first comment! FYI: It was not my write, therefore I did not personally include anything in the write. It was taken word for word from a write I found on NPR.
Alycedale: Thanks for letting me know that I was not clear in my message. I agree with you. I completely disagree that laws should be passed against this practice. My comment was simply stating that it was “amazing” (not in a good way) that we could get a law passed but that we can’t seem to get laws passed about men that are “disrespectful” to women walking the streets. My point was…Whether you think “sagging pants” are disrespectful or not, they aren’t harming anyone unless you consider an unsightly visual as harm. Women, on the other hand, are being disrespected on the streets by men, and it is harming women.
Being in the fashion industry, I was focusing more on the “fashion statement” that was being made in the write. Clothing is a form of self expression, and I feel that you should be able to wear anything that you desire. (This does not include graphic or written statements on clothing that disses an individual in a racist or sexist, etc. manner.) I wasn’t addressing much else in the write – leaving it up to the rest of the readers to comment on.
Thanks for bringing it up, though. Since my comment was clearly unclear, it probably was not clear to other readers either. I HOPE it is now.
Rita: I read that write last night. Sickening how low the right will go to win. It just means that we too need to be “vigilant.” (That’s a nod to you Alycedale and Bach) Vigilant: An attitude that we all need to possess right now.
Irene: I intend to spare no power to defeat them.
Helen: I appreciate that you have that much confidence in me. I have confidence in you too. And I know that if we all come together and voice what we know is right and appeal to our sisters, they will see that now is the time to seize our equality and independence, step up and lose the lock-step, and vote in support of our sisters. It doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. Women have the majority of the voting power. We’re just stupid if we don’t take advantage when we can. This is our time…all we have to do is take it.
Jamie: I applaud you for not joining the crowd. I’m happy that you are a strong, thinking woman who sees that the sick blatant acts of harassment and intimidation of OTWs is wrong. Now, I encourage you to take the next step and have your own meeting with the other women and inspire them to think and do as you do.
The fact that you even read my blog tells me that you are an independent woman with her own opinions. And, if you’ve been reading here for even a short while, you are well prepared to influence them to do the right thing. I have total faith.
Pattie: Wonderful comment – Love the enthusiasm and advice! I HOPE all of my readers will read and heed. And of course, take advantage of early voting if you can.
Teresa: What world are you living in? More importantly, what media are you listening to? Evidently it is Faux FOX news. You’re being brainwashed with lies. C’mon sister, you can do much better by using your own mind. Empower yourself and empower other women, by thinking for yourself, and inspiring other women to do the same.
I’m done. Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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