Robby Mook is looking at the early voting numbers and sees record turnout, great early voting numbers for us, and a new coalition has emerged.
A Shudder Goes Down Republican Spines As Early Voting Reveals A New Clinton Coalition
In a conference call with reporters, Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook announced an early voting turnout record. At least 40% of voters in battleground states are turning out early.
In Florida, more registered Democrats than Republicans have turned out to vote early or by mail. The Clinton camp believes that they are winning Florida by 170,000 ballots. In North Carolina, there has been a 16% increase in early voting, and in Nevada more than 40% early voted.
According to Mook, Clinton strategy has been to turn out voters who didn’t vote in previous elections.
Going hard after “low propensity voters” was a brilliant strategy that has paid dividends in Florida, Nevada and North Carolina.
The Clinton campaign manager also said that there had been no surge from the Trump campaign and his voters, so the Republican nominee is going to need to outperform Romney on Election Day in Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada to win.
Trump needs to do better than Romney on Tuesday to make up the early voting ground he lost. He won’t.
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A NEW COALITION
Mook also told reporters on the call something that should worry Republicans to death. Hillary Clinton has built a new political coalition.
The first part of the Clinton coalition is made up of Latino voters. The Latino vote has increased 120%-130%. The second part of Clinton coalition is Asian-American voters who have seen a 90% increase in early voting turnout. The third part of the new Clinton coalition is suburban women. Millennials are supporting Clinton after eight years of backing President Obama. The final piece of the Clinton coalition is African-Americans. African-American early voting turnout is 22% higher than in 2012.
AA turnout is 22% higher than in 2012 at this point. Latino early vote turnout has more than doubled over 2012. Asian-American early turnout vote has almost doubled over 2012. We are looking good, if not perhaps in Iowa or Ohio where those coalition partners aren’t as prevalent, but in states like Florida, Nevada, North Carolina. And that makes all the difference in this election.
US News and World Report:
Hillary's Building a Wall Too! Early voting is providing plenty of positive signs for Hillary Clinton.
The word of the day is "firewall." My friends, can you say "firewall"?
I got a late start so this is going to be a fairly brief entry in my series rounding up news items to calm the suddenly jangled nerves of Clinton supporters and #NeverTrumpers as we enter the final weekend (!) of the 2016 campaign.
- Jon Ralston, the savviest political analyst in Nevada, used the term "firewall" to describe the early vote margin Democrats seem to be running up in that state. As of Friday morning, he figured Democrats had banked a 37,000-vote margin. "So he can win Nevada," Ralston wrote Friday morning. "But Trump would need base numbers and indie numbers that seem unlikely right now." Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, told reporters on a conference call that the campaign figures Trump would have to win Nevada by 10 percentage points on Election Day to overcome her advantage there.
Actually, what happened Friday night in Nevada was nothing short of amazing, and that 37,000 vote margin Hillary had banked by Friday morning has now exploded to almost 50,000. Trump will now have to win Nevada by some 18, 19, 20% margin on Tuesday.
He won’t.
- In Florida early voting, Democratic strategist Steve Schale sees further positive signs for Clinton, specifically a marked uptick in Latino voting. "The two places with the highest Puerto Rican populations, Orange and Osceola counties both out-performed their projected share of the statewide vote," he wrote Friday morning. Florida Hispanics are typically thought of as being Cuban, but Puerto Ricans have been migrating to the state in great numbers in recent years. More broadly, Schale wrote, Hispanic voting patterns so far are the "definition of a surge." It should be obvious, but is worth noting anyway: Hispanics aren't turning out in greater numbers to vote for Donald Trump. Schale goes on to add: "Right now, Democrats hold a 117K vote advantage among all low propensity voters, in large part due to this Hispanic surge. 32% of Democratic voters so far are low propensity voters, compared to 26% of the GOP voters. But among [no party affiliation voters or NPAs], the number rises to 48%. That's right, 48% of NPAs who have voted so far are low propensity – and 25% of those are Hispanic. In fact, of the NPA low propensity voters, a full 42% of them are non-white. That right there is the Clinton turnout machine edge." Reminder: Turnout is important, even if Donald Trump doesn't seem to think it is. Mook told reporters that the campaign believes it's leading in Florida by around 170,000 votes overall and said that at this time four years ago, the Obama campaign figured that it was behind by 15,000 votes. (Obama won the state, narrowly.) Schale sums up: "All of this has me leaning a bit that the state is shaping up nicely for HRC, but while I think that, in no way is it in the bag, or close to it."
The article explains that sharply increased Latino vote is not only noticable in Florida and Nevada, but also North Carolina and Colorado. Also notes that Virginia is on pace to break early voting records “with a disproportionate number of early ballots cast in predominantly Democratic Fairfax County, the state's largest jurisdiction."
Back to Mook’s conference call and predictions:
- Across the country, Mook told reporters Friday, early voting is breaking records. And for whatever it's worth, the Clinton campaign sees itself as having "leverage[d] this early voting period to build a firewall in states with early voting to turn out our supporters early and build up a lead that Donald Trump is incapable of overcoming."