Don’t buy the disinfo
At Helene Ground Zero (Asheville, N.C.) with a week to go until Election Day, we’ve got news crews from around the globe underfoot. Crews from Japan (multiple), from South Korea, France, The Netherlands, Canada and others I can’t recall.
A seasoned election protection attorney from Boston told me in 2014 he’d never seen an operation like ours. None of that interests these reporters. They want to report on how Helene is depressing turnout in this swing state. Got to keep that horse race racy.
To cut them some slack, they’re here because around the world their viewers are worried what happens to all of us if Donald Trump wins or attempts another coup. North Carolina is not the only state that matters on that, but results here do matter.
Please. Do not buy into the hype about how close the presidential election is. Simon Rosenberg warns about how many “red wave” Republican polls are flooding the zone to skew polling averages and to fool observers into thinking the race is closer than it is.
Trump is not the only one who thinks the polls are bullshit. Tom Bonier does too.
And Elon Musk’s simplistic analysis is not worth the platform he’s promoting it on.
Candidates and campaign managers ask what it all means. Little about this election is normal. Republicans typically hold off and vote in an Election Day flood. Not this year. Their orange savior ordered them to vote early and vote early they have. Their turnout exceeds Democratic turnout in N.C. to date. But does it mean anything? Unaffiliated registrants outnumber Ds and Rs (Ds by 7 points). They’ll determine the outcome, but their statewide turnout average to date is a point lower than normal. Twenty-three percent of GOP primary voters in North Carolina voted for Nikki Haley. What will they do now? Grit their teeth and vote Trump? Vote Harris? Stay home? Leave the presidential race blank and vote R down-ballot? I don’t know.
The graph atop this post shows turnout trends in typical years in my county since 2018. Ordinarily, Day 1 of early voting and the last two days are huge. There may or may not be weekend voting, thus the dips. But during the first full week, turnout trends downward. Not this year (yellow line). It’s trended up. And we’re voting every day in our county, 9a-5p until this Saturday (9a-3p).
In the pandemic year of 2020, the volume of absentee-by-mail ballots was enormous. Not so this year. Helene evacuees are not finished. Some will returning to the region late to vote by Election Day. Others will vote absentee from where they’ve relocated. So facile press comparisons of early vote turnout to turnout from 2020 are apples to oranges. Useless, if not misinformation. We may hit 2020 numbers (at least here) when all’s said and done.
As Coach Walz says, keep running all the way through the tape.