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    Saturday, November 30

    Will This Election Sour Democrats on Early Voting?

    Updated: US News No Comments
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    I am no fan of early voting. Call me old school, but I’m no fan of Election Month. If we could go back to the time when our elections took place on just one day with select circumstances acceptable for absentee voting, I’d be happy. 

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    That said, early voting is the current reality, and we have to play by the same rules that Democrats do to compete. And the Republican Party learned this valuable lesson after the Democrats’ massive early-voting strategy blindsided them in 2020. That has Democrat strategists nervous.

    Based on recent reports, early voting is hitting record highs in swing states, and Republicans have significantly closed the gap with Democrats compared to previous years, in some cases voting in greater numbers than Democrats.

    Jon Ralston, the editor of The Nevada Independent, has been reporting on early vote totals in Nevada, and the news is good for the GOP. As of Sunday afternoon, Republican early vote totals outnumber Democrats by roughly 43,000.

    “The R lead is 4 percent statewide, or just under 43,000 ballots. Almost 1.1 million votes have been posted. That’s 53 percent,” Ralston writes. “If turnout is 1.4 million, that means we are approaching 80 percent of the vote being in. I think it could be a little more, but it’s still a bit unclear with slow mail count. So I’d say there are at least 300,000 more ballots out there, give or take.”

    If Trump wins Nevada, it will be the rurals that win it for him. This is the opposite situation as we go into Election Day than what we have seen in the past: Instead of Dems building a big ballot lead, it’s the Rs in The Unicorn Year. And the question is: Can the Ds come back with mail ballots, crossover votes and making Election Day a wash?

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    Ralston’s analysis supposes that Republicans have a “30,000 raw vote lead right now,” assuming Democrats have a slight advantage with independent voters. 

    “So can the Ds overcome a 30,000-vote lead?” he asks. “As I have said this is about at the edge of what’s doable for them and could be slightly too much to overcome.”

    Other states’ early voting totals similarly look good for Donald Trump, as Republican early votes have eclipsed Democrats’ in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and are performing better than in past years in other battleground states.

    I have said before that early voting totals are likely not the best indicator of how this election will go, but recently on MSNBC, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki asked former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina what the Harris-Walz campaign’s biggest right now is, and he said, it’s the early voting numbers. 

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    “Well, look. I think it’s a couple things,” he said. “The early vote numbers are a little scary, and you and I have been texting back and forth. Republicans didn’t do what they did last time. Last time, Trump said don’t early vote, and so they didn’t. Republicans do have an advantage in early vote numbers.”

    He added, “When the early vote comes in, it’s gonna look a little bit different than 2020, and that’s scary.”

    If this holds up and Trump beats the Democrats at their own game, I wonder if the Democratic Party will suddenly hate early voting.

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