Welcome to the Daily Kos Elections early voting roundup, which appears every weekday until Election Day. Click here to find out if and when early voting is available in your state.
We’re two weeks out from Election Day, and according to the tally being kept by Professor Michael McDonald, we now have seen more than 10 million votes tallied in the 2016 election. This means, in all probability, that around 7 to 8 percent of the total electorate has already cast ballots, and that’s only going to grow.
The big headline on Tuesday was the continued long lines in Texas, which continue to set records when compared to past cycles. Polling data in the past two weeks had hinted at a surprising level of competitiveness in the largest historically red state in the Union. For veteran Democratic election junkies, a purple Texas had long seemed like a noble project for future cycles, but a touch too ambitious for the present. These early vote numbers make it seem like it’s edging closer to reality.
Now, a cautionary note—the news is not uniformly positive: There are some red counties that are voting huge (though there may be a critical caveat there, too, which I will address in a moment), and some blue counties (like San Antonio’s Bexar County) are not booming at the same rate.
All that said, something is clearly happening in the Lone Star State, so let’s start there. We also have updates for Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Louisiana, and Ohio.
TEXAS
Texas got everyone’s attention on Monday, when record turnout in almost every county marked the first day of in-person early voting. On the second day of early voting in what Molly Ivins once lovingly referred to as the “Great State,” there was little sign of diminishing enthusiasm. Indeed, the relatively few but populous blue counties of Texas saw Tuesday turnout that either came close to, or exceeded, opening day turnout.
One of the bluest counties in the state, Austin’s Travis County, saw an improvement of nearly 2,000 votes over opening day, with 38,000 votes tallied. Houston’s Harris County, meanwhile, actually improved on its first-day turnout, with more than 73,000 in-person votes tallied, an increase of 6,000 votes over Monday. Dallas County, meanwhile, saw an additional 53,000 people go to the polls on Tuesday, only a slight drop from Monday’s record (58,000) turnout.
Meanwhile, San Antonio’s Bexar County, like all the other large counties in the Lone Star State, broke its first-day early voting record, with an 18 percent increase compared to 2012. On Tuesday, however, they set another new record, logging just over 38,600 votes. That was an increase of more than 3,000 votes from Monday.
Some red counties, as has been reported elsewhere, have also seen giant spikes in turnout. Nowhere was that surge more evident on Monday than Collin County, a suburban red (65-33 Romney) county north of Dallas. Collin County almost doubled its previous record on Monday. On Tuesday, they almost matched those numbers with over 30,000 votes cast.
But there are two important caveats. First of all, like many suburban counties in Texas, Collin has seen an explosion in population, with an estimated additional 132,000 people moving into the region since the 2010 census. For another, as my colleague and friend David Jarman reminded me, Collin County might (key word: might) be ideal #NeverTrump territory. It’s becoming more ethnically diverse with each passing year, and it has a comparably high education level. Now, none of this is to say that Collin is turning blue this cycle or next. But it seems more than plausible that Republicans will not be able to count on Trump doubling up on Hillary Clinton the way that Romney was able to do to Obama in 2012.
FLORIDA
Leave it to Florida Democratic guru Steve Schale to give a proper summary of Day Two of early voting in Florida:
If Day One was a solid A for Florida Democrats, Day two was more like my college experience, a nice pedestrian B.
For the second day in a row, Democrats won the in-person early voting in the Sunshine State. Key Democratic counties had solid turnout, and they performed at rates where Democratic turnout exceeded party registration. Case in point: Broward County, which holds a 51-22 Democratic registration edge. Through two days of in-person early vote and several weeks of vote-by-mail, the Democrats are outstripping even that yawning gap. Democrats are responsible for 58 percent of all returned ballots, versus just 24 percent of the returned ballots coming from Republican voters.
Next door, in increasingly Democratic Miami-Dade County, Day Two of in-person early vote turnout was only 600 votes off of a brisk Day One pace, with nearly 35,000 votes cast (though the partisan gap was a more modest 48-29). Even in Jacksonville’s Duval County, one of the few large urban counties that tends to vote Republican (albeit modestly) in presidential elections, Democrats have almost made up a 3,000 vote vote-by-mail edge for the GOP in just two days of in-person early voting.
However, there are some signs that should temper any crowing about a pending blue tsunami in Florida. Republicans have recovered somewhat in terms of ballots returned by mail. What was a 1.7 percent gap between the two parties prior to the start of in-person early voting has stretched back out to a lead of 2.5 percent. Now, this is still considerably smaller than the gap by the end of 2012, where Democrats trailed the GOP in returned votes-by-mail by more than 5 percent. But it offset some of those early voting gains, leaving Republicans with a net edge in overall turnout of just over 57,00 votes.
COLORADO
Colorado has, in recent cycles, been considered a toss-up state. This is most starkly reflected in the most recent voter registration statistics in the state, where there is almost a perfect split between Democratic, Republican, and independent active registrations. Out of the 3.1 million registered voters in the state, Democrats have only 6,000 more voters in Colorado than does the GOP.
Which is what makes today’s release of the current tally of returned ballots so notable. At present, the Democrats enjoy a raw vote lead of 23,000 ballots returned out of the nearly 300,000 total returned ballots. This works out to an edge of eight percent (41-33). This means, of course, that Democrats are returning their ballots at a much quicker rate than their GOP peers. Of course, it could just mean that fewer Democrats will vote later on, but it could also be an early indication of an enthusiasm gap in the state working in favor of the Democrats.
By way of comparison, in 2012 the GOP actually enjoyed a narrow early vote edge (36-34) on Election Day (though Obama still managed to carry the state). However, Colorado has since switched to all-mail balloting, so comparisons with earlier cycles are tricky.
NEVADA
The blue rout in this key western tossup did abate slightly on Tuesday. Republican turnout actually managed to edge Democratic turnout in swingy Washoe County (home of Reno), but the GOP still could not match its 2-point registration advantage in the state. Heavily blue Clark County (Las Vegas), meanwhile, saw turnout match both Sunday and Monday turnout, at a partisan split right at registration levels. Statewide, the split as of Tuesday night had Democrats with a raw vote edge just shy of 25,000 votes. The partisan split, overall, of ballots returned thus far (in-person early voting plus mailed votes) is 46 percent Democratic, 35 percent Republican. That is almost double the registration margin in Nevada, and, as Jon Ralston notes, almost precisely where we were in terms of early voting at this point in 2012.
LOUISIANA
Tuesday marked the opening day of in-person early voting in the Pelican State. So, has the Democratic surge seen in early voting in many other venues made its way into the Bayou? The short answer, according to a day-one analysis by the locals at JMC Analytics, is “no.” While early voting (now in its third presidential cycle in Louisiana) reached a record high of over 87,000 ballots, both the partisan breakdown (48 D, 38 R) and the racial breakdown (70 percent white, 27 percent black) were both incrementally less favorable for Hillary Clinton’s chances than on the first day of early voting in 2012 (when the electorate was 29 percent black and had a partisan split of Democrats +14).
OHIO
There was no major shift in the in-person or vote-by-mail stats from the Buckeye State since our last update, but Tuesday morning, the crew at Fox News did manage to embarrass themselves on the subject:
In a discussion with the Republican National Committee's chief strategist and communications director, Sean Spicer, Hemmer spilled the beans:
HEMMER: I’m looking at early voting. You have good news in Ohio. White share of the vote’s up three points from four years ago. Black share of the vote is down seven.
Almost as telling was the fact that Spicer did nothing to challenge the suggestion that it’s good for Republicans if African Americans don’t vote.
That's Fox—and the modern GOP—right there in a nutshell.