Record-breaking early voting fuels Democratic optimism
More than 46 million votes have been cast before Election Day.
More than 46 million votes have been cast in advance of 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.”
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