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.
In the week-plus we have been offering this roundup of early voting activities and the progress of the “pregame show” of the 2016 election, we have focused most of our attention on who was voting. That is to say, most of our attention has been on the partisan makeup of the early electorate in key states.
Today we shift that focus.
Today we take a geographic approach to the proceedings, because, in many ways, that might be a better indicator of the relative health of get-out-the-vote operations for both the Democrats and the Republicans. And the reason why is simple: While some regions or counties do shift over time (see: Osceola County, Florida, which went from supporting George W. Bush by 5 points in 2004 to backing Barack Obama by 24 points in 2012 as the county became dramatically more diverse), a lot of counties have more predictable partisan leans. What’s more, while those counties might shift with the national winds, they tend to be relatively stable in the short run.
To put it another way, we know that if Clark County, Nevada is voting big (despite what a decidedly pessimistic poll from CNN implied), that’s great news for Hillary Clinton. After all, Clark even went for John Kerry even though he lost the Silver State by 5 points in 2004. Likewise, if the Florida panhandle is turning out voters, that is music to the ears of the Trump team.
It’s safe to say that, in line with recent polling, a geographic look at the early voting map yields mixed results. If one were to take a global view of it, the watch word would be cautious optimism.
NORTH CAROLINA
Let’s start in the Tar Heel State, if only because the GOP’s controversial alterations in early voting times and locations made it hard to do a proper analysis early on. Now, according to one follower of North Carolina politics, the ground has been mostly leveled. Thus, it is a reasonable time to look at the numbers.
For the Democrats to be successful and hit the trifecta at the top of the ticket (president, governor, and U.S. Senate), they need monster turnout from the three congressional districts in the state (out of 13—helllllooooo gerrymandering!) where Democrats thrive. As of today, according to this great vote tracker put together by the conservative Civitas Institute, they are close to getting what they need, but there are some mild causes for concern.
In combined in-person and mail-in early vote to date, the district returning the most ballots is the 4th (71-27 Obama). This is very good news for the Democrats, as this is one of their three home districts. The heavily African-American 1st District (72-28 Obama) ranks fifth out of 13. The laggard here, alas, is the most Democratic district in the state: the 12th District, which is also heavily Obama (79-21). That district ranks eighth out of 13 and has returned more than 32,000 fewer ballots compared to the 4th. Now, in fairness, these numbers could easily be skewed by a disparity in registered voters, but the bottom line remains that there appears to be a geographic disparity here.
And as we’ve noted before, there is also a pronounced racial disparity in the in-person early vote, and it seems to be getting a bit worse. African-American voters now make up just 22.0 percent of the early vote, which is actually a dip of half a point from the beginning of the week.
That said, the geographic picture in North Carolina (largely owed to the explosion of votes out of the 4th district, and lags in the heavily GOP 5th and 8th districts) is marginally better for Democrats than it was in 2012. Even if no voting preferences changed among demographic groups (and polls indicate that white voters are a tad less pro-GOP in the state than they were in 2012), the winning margin for the Republicans in the state in 2012 (2.1 percent) would be halved just by the shifts in where the vote is coming from.
NEVADA
Democrats have been eyeing the Silver State for two reasons: one, as a critical piece in the firewall to prevent Donald Trump from getting to 270 electoral votes, and two, because holding on to the Senate seat of the retiring Harry Reid is of equally critical importance in the quest to regain control of the upper chamber of Congress.
As in North Carolina, the news here is more good than bad, but any celebrations here would be immensely premature.
As Nevada’s Jon Ralston noted in his blog devoted to the early vote in Nevada, the Democrats had a very good day on Wednesday in crucial Clark County (Las Vegas). Democrats turned out to the tune of a 4,800-vote edge over the GOP in the county, on a day when the Democratic nominee chose to make a stop in Las Vegas with the hopes of boosting the early vote. The Democratic ballot edge in Clark County is now creeping past 55,000 votes total. As Ralston noted last night on MSNBC, if the Democrats can get the Clark County firewall a tad higher, it becomes mathematically impossible for Trump to win the state, barring something extremely odd (e.g., a huge margin among independent voters, or a surge of Trump Democrats).
That said, looking at the totality of the numbers, there are some red flags. For one thing, Clark is not turning out the volume that we are seeing elsewhere in the state. Clark’s turnout is running a little bit under what their statewide share of the registered voters would suggest. Meanwhile, the so-called rural “cow counties” are (a) turning out above their expected share of registration, and (b) are turning out Republicans in heavy numbers (with a 55-25 split in returned ballots thus far).
This tells us that, even as Hillary is right where Democrats were in 2012 (in terms of a raw vote advantage) in Clark County, and slightly ahead of where Dems were in Reno’s Washoe County, she is getting thumped in the cow counties. This has the effect of depressing the overall edge for the Democrats statewide.
In 2012, the Democrats had a net edge of 48,000 returned ballots after early voting had finished. In 2016, that number is looking like it will be closer to 35-40 thousand, barring a huge Democratic surge at the close (which, given what happened in Clark on Wednesday, is still quite possible).
The good news for the Democrats is that they had a 7-point cushion at the top of the ticket to play with in 2012. But the goal is to get Democratic Senate hopeful Catherine Cortez Masto across the finish line. Democrats would really love to see a turnout spike in Clark County to make that happen, because even though Rep. Joe Heck, the Republican Senate nominee, represents Clark County in the House, he’ll probably lose the county overall.
florida
Florida, after a strong initial two days of early voting, has been a bit vexing for Democrats. In 2012, at the conclusion of in-person early voting, the Democrats had an edge with in-person early voters of 247,000 votes. That lead was partially offset by mail-in balloting, but it is likely that the Democrats had an edge overall heading into Election Day.
If that is going to happen in 2016, Democratic in-person early voting is going to need to surge late. Right now, the in-person early voting edge for the Democrats is just 63,000 votes. Now, Democrats are doing a little better with mail-in votes (down 75,000 votes, as opposed to 79,000 votes four years ago). But the overall gap heading into Election Day certainly looks like it will be worse than it did in 2012.
Geographically, there may be some reasons why this is happening. As Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report noted yesterday, nine counties had already exceeded their 2012 early vote totals. Seven of them were Republican counties. Indeed, it appears that the issue isn’t that Democrats are not getting their votes out—it is that the GOP strongholds are getting a bigger share of their vote out.
OHIO
For most of the early vote period, the story has been that Democratic turnout in Ohio was depressed, while Republican turnout was energized. This has driven a lot of the narrative about Ohio for the last two weeks.
TargetSmart’s Tom Bonier has been tracking the early vote in the Buckeye State, and he has noted that, as the early vote period has gone along, there has been considerable recovery in both Franklin County (Columbus) and Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), two major Democratic strongholds.
The good news here is that Cuyahoga and Franklin are, according to Bonier’s analysis, moving ever closer to parity with 2012. But there is also some sobering news, and that is that they aren’t at parity with 2012, when Obama won a narrow 3-point statewide win. After all, Cuyahoga and Franklin gave the President a combined 387,000-vote margin of victory.
So, take, for example, the message earlier in the week from Cuyahoga that their turnout was going to dip from 70 percent down to 62 percent. That would, in theory, cost Hillary Clinton somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 votes. That’s potentially harrowing, given that Obama’s statewide margin was just 166,000 votes.
But, as with Florida and Nevada, it is important to note that the Democrats are playing from a position of strength. They don’t need to match their 2012 totals to win those states. They just have to be close. They have cushions of varying sizes (a bit wider in Nevada, decidedly narrow in Florida), but they are cushions.
On Friday, the sprint to the finish begins. Some states will start wrapping up their early voting periods, while others will be heading into critical final weekend pushes to churn out votes. We would all do well to make sure we are participants (either by voting or by getting out the vote) rather than spectators as we head into the final weekend of the 2016 cycle.