Be a cool kid
North Carolina in-person voting starts Thursday. It started Tuesday in Georgia.
Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state (CNN):
A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
Please, be a cool kid. Whether you live in a swing state or not, vote on Day 1 of early voting. It’s about enthusiasm. It’s about showing Democratic strength. It’s about providing “social proof” that tells neighbors voting is what all the cool kids are doing.
It’s also about helping Democratic campaigns focus their resources on a smaller pool of harder-to-turn-out voters than you. (It will also quickly stop your campaign calls and door knocks.)
A caution
But don’t get overconfident about those big numbers in Georgia.
My early vote caution to excited freshman candidates here in NC when they see Democrats outvoting Republicans by 2 to 1 is this: Republicans bat last.
Nevertheless, here in N.C., we’ve got game. The GOP has Donald Trump and Mark Robinson.
It’s no secret that Josh Stein is in the driver’s seat in the race for governor against Robinson, but despite polls showing other statewide races being close, internal polls show Democrats in positive territory. The election is, as they say, within the margin of effort.
About having “game,” this from The New York Times (shared article):
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns.
Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.
Interviews with more than four dozen voters, activists, campaign aides and officials in four pivotal counties — Erie County, Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga. — reveal a diffuse, at times unwieldy Republican effort that has raised questions from party operatives about effectiveness in the face of the more tightly structured Harris campaign operation. Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether.
Rep. Jeff Jackson, candidate for N.C. attorney general, told a group here over the weekend that the numbers of field contacts this year rivals the Obama campaign of 2008. The number of Harris field offices and staff here is perhaps unprecedented. Another potential game-changer is what’s happening in Mecklenburg County (Charlotte). Maricopa in Arizona and Meck in N.C. are two counties of keen interest in this election.
Mecklenburg has traditionally been a drag on Democrats’ statewide performance, but that may be changing. Drew Cromer, Meck’s new under-30 chair, has brought new energy and big fundraising to his county, as well as an organizing effort not seen before.
Simon Rosenberg and his Hopium community have raised over $700k for the state party led by Anderson Clayton. Out-of-state groups like Swing Blue Alliance are directing funding and volunteers to Meck. If they can boost Meck’s turnout a point or two that will be huge.
So go vote tomorrow, all y’all in North Carolina!