This is the final installment of our early voting roundup, and for a very important (and obvious) reason: as of a few hours ago, the voting is no longer “early.”
Yep, polls on Election Day are open nationwide, and we are hours away from starting to tally the votes and (finally!) bringing the 2016 cycle to a close. What was rather notable, in this often-insane early voting period, was that it is likely that close to a third of the electorate have already cast their ballots.
The final weekend of early voting created a pair of big headlines, in states that are thousands of miles apart. Both are considered crucial to today’s outcome, and both may deliver big gains to the Democrats amid a tidal wave of voters of color. The outcome in both states, of course, is still in doubt, but if the Democrats score vital wins in either ones, it will be indisputable that a diverse electorate will be the key to victory, as is so often the case for the blue team.
NEVADA
How good was Nevada’s Democratic turnout on Friday (the final day of early voting in the Silver State)? So good that, on the morning of Election Day, Donald Trump elected to file a (pretty damned frivolous) lawsuit over it.
In short, it was a Clark County-fueled bloodletting of the GOP, as Democratic voters paced a record day of early voting in Las Vegas. By the time the day was done, the Democrats had a net edge of over 45,000 votes in the state. What’s more: over 60 percent of the state’s registered voters had already cast ballots before Election Day.
The symbolic moment that was the capstone to the early voting effort in Nevada was the crush of last-day early voting at Cardenas Market, a flood of Latino voters so massive that the site had to be held open to accommodate the long line of eager voters:
Cardenas could well be the (wonderfully ironic, given the heavily Latino demographics of the electorate at that site) coda to the Trump campaign in Nevada. No less an authority than Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston seems convinced—his final entry on his statewide early voting blog was entitled “Early voting kills Trump in NV.”
Furthermore, Ralston suspects that the undertow of this late-breaking wave of Democratic early voters could keep the U.S. Senate seat (held by the retiring Harry Reid), as well as pick up two U.S. House seats and both houses of the state legislature.
FLORIDA
Two days after Nevada provided a whale of a western swan song for the Democratic GOTV early vote campaign, Florida followed suit. The late momentum of early voting swung to the Democrats, who finished with a resounding flourish in the Sunshine State. The capper, one that had to put smiles on Democratic faces, was the combined 97,000 votes cast on the final day in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties.
Heading into election day, Florida had already had over 6.4 million voters cast their ballots either via mail or in-person early voting. The Democrats headed into the election with a ballot edge of 81,000 votes.
Now, pessimists will note that Democratic edge is about half of what it was in 2012, when Democrats enjoyed a 167,000 vote advantage. However, there are two mitigating circumstances that have both been mentioned in these roundups over the past two weeks: (1) An estimate last week suggested that 50,000 registered Democrats in 2012 had switched to the GOP in 2016 in-state, thus we can conclude that the 167,000 vote margin was artificially high because of those ancestral ConservaDems; (2) Democrats had more outstanding mail-in ballots (by almost 80,000) left to return.
Now, the second caveat is also a cause for concern: there is no guarantee that said voters will return their absentee ballots (indeed, statewide, there were still north of a half million unreturned mail-in ballots). So that could be a five-digit Democratic ballot edge left lying on the table (quite literally!) at the end of the night.
Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who sounded many a cautionary note earlier in the proceedings, ended the 2016 early voting campaign with a tone of measured confidence:
[...] pretty much everything that Hillary Clinton wanted to have happen to position herself to win Florida has happened.
I was asked yesterday about a journalist, "So Schale, what would you be worried about if you were in her campaign?"
Truthfully, not a lot. I am normally superstitious about turnout, so of course you worry about that. But at the same time, I also recognize that for Trump to win, he has to have a ridiculously good day. I suspect that when early voting is counted, that she will have won the early vote by 3-4 points, and if early voting is, let's say 2/3rds of all the votes, it means Trump has to win tomorrow by 6-8 points. I don't think 6-8 points is out there today for him.
ELSEWHERE
What had been a bit of an electoral swoon in Ohio and Iowa righted itself a bit by the end, but both remained causes of concern. While the net Ohio early vote (in-person plus absentee) would up in a marginally better position in key swing and Democratic counties like Hamilton (Cincinnati) and Franklin (Columbus), but totals in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) were a bit underwhelming. Meanwhile, in the Hawkeye State, Democratic performance relative to the GOP in the early vote was down from 2012, to the tune (in raw votes) of about 24,500 votes. While that is not great news, it’s worth remembering that Obama did have a little bit of a cushion in 2012, when he won the state of Iowa by 6 points.
Finally, a word about North Carolina. Due to the active effort by state Republicans to suppress the early vote in key Democratic constituencies (which was well covered by Daily Kos), it is probably not helpful to attempt apples-to-apples comparisons to 2012. But for those who feel compelled, the African-American vote, predictably, was down substantially: from 27 percent in 2012 to 22 percent in 2016. But one sign that should inspire real alarm in the red team, despite their early vote shenanigans: women made up nearly 56.7 percent of the returned ballots thus far (for ballots where gender could be determined—for reasons unknown to me, about 65,000 ballots were not specified by gender). That is up nearly one full percentage point from 2012.
The question now is whether or not the diverse coalition of the Democratic Party will be enough to offset the...ahem...less diverse coalition of the GOP. The beauty of Election Day is that we will know that answer literally within hours.