Both the flood of “Breaking News” and the usual political distractions threaten to take our eyes off the ball six week ahead of the November election. Our determination to be right and to knock down the latest shiny lie or defend against the outrage du jour can be our undoing. Eyes on the prize.
Rather than react to the latest Republican voter suppression schemes or game out how Democrats might stop Mitch McConnell from approving another right-wing fanatic to the Supreme Court, Thomas Edsall examines five areas where things might go wrong for Democrats on Nov. 3. Let’s focus on the first and third:
First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.
[…]
Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.
A friend traveling on New England back roads sent a note yesterday saying, “Until yesterday, we had only seen 5 Biden yard signs. 100’s of Trump signs. Honest. Not until yesterday did we start seeing some more Biden signs in yards.” I reassured him that Democrats had sent candidates over $170 million on ActBlue since Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (now over $200 million) while enthusiastic Trump supporters were sending their money to vendors hawking Trump campaign merch.
Signs don’t vote, nor do boats. Neither do Democrat-leaning “demographics.” But newly registered voters tend to. On that, Edsall heard from an unnamed Democratic strategist (key passage bolded):
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall
registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.
In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees
is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.
The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.
On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but
it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.
Those registration numbers are as worrying as yard signs are to my wandering friend.
Signs may not vote. But they are an indication of voter enthusiasm. We saw a similar phenomenon here in 2016. A wealthy Bernie supporter here was so unnerved by the presence of Trump signs (in the absence of Clinton’s) that he himself printed and fabricated thousands of 1/4-size “Clinton 2016” signs. Democrats snatched them up in days.
Edsall also considers the potential risk that using absentee ballots poses to Democratic voters considering they are prone to “disqualification for errors, large and small.” (See Pennsylvania’s “naked ballots.”) An August WSJ/NBC poll showed only 11 percent of Trump supporters planned to vote by mail compared with 47 percent of Biden voters. Seen another way, absentee ballot voters support Biden over Trump by 74-20, and Election Day voters favor Trump by 62-30. Watch those rejection rates and follow absentee ballot directions to the letter.
Edsall acknowledges that, “Despite these warning signs, Biden is better positioned than Trump with six weeks to go.” Great. And not great enough.
A friend in South Carolina just found out that having applied for an absentee ballot, she forgoes the option to vote in person. (You have that option in North Carolina.) But it made me look at dates for absentee processing there.
Per NCSL, South Carolina cannot begin processing absentee ballots until Election Day. The same is true in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We know Acting @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and his party mean to dispute votes counted after Nov. 3, so any Biden voters in those states who feel they can vote early or an Election Day should do so, both to avoid absentee rejection and RNC litigation.
There is no early voting in bright red South Carolina, so that makes a bad situation worse for Harrison supporters.
Nervous voters asked me four years ago what the chances were that Donald Trump could win. As ineffective as Hillary Clinton’s ground game appeared, I assured them (and believed) there was no way Trump would win. Americans were just not that crazy:
Then I greeted voters outside a nearby polling place on Election Day. A smiling woman wearing a thick, black shawl in seventy-degree weather offered Republican voters a list of “pro-life, pro-Israel, constitution and liberty” candidates. Occasionally, she raised her arms and talked to the cloudless sky.
The rest — and 200,000 dead and counting — is history. Please, do not get so caught up playing defense that you forget to play offense. Register new voters. Turn them out. Volunteer. Hit the phones. Eyes on the prize. Don’t get beat again by Talks To The Sky.
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