Early voting reaches record levels
More than 9 million Californians already have cast ballots before Election Day on Tuesday
They’ve penned handwritten letters, called hundreds of battleground- state voters and sent thousands of texts. They’ve fed ballots into mailboxes and drop boxes weeks before the deadline at unprecedented levels. From record early voting to enthusiasm for phone banking, the 2020 election has sparked a wave of civic engagement seldom seen among California’s voters.
Adore him or despise him, President Donald Trump gets much of the credit for generating coast-tocoast election fever.
“I’ve definitely not seen this level of excitement in my experience in politics,” said Matt Shupe, Contra Costa County GOP chair.
With California sending 22 million registered voters a mail-in ballot because of the coronavirus pandemic, more than 9 million had already returned their ballots by the start of Friday — north of 40% — blowing past 2016’s total early vote.
Data compiled by Californiabased Political Data Inc. and the California Secretary of State’s office provides a snapshot of which voters appear to be the most enthusiastic.
Democrats, especially, have gotten their ballots in early, with roughly half of voters registered with California’s dominant political party already weighing in.
More than 60% of the state’s senior voters have already voted, but the real surge is that more than 1.7 million of the state’s younger voters — ages 18-34 — have already returned ballots, exceeding their 2016 vote-by-mail numbers.
Roughly half of the state’s White and Asian voters have already cast ballots, as have more than a third of Black voters and roughly a third of Latinx voters.
Early turnout is especially high in the Bay Area, where more than half of voters in the five-county re
gion have cast their ballots. It’s much lower so far in Los Angeles County, where roughly 35% of the 5.9 million voters in the state’s largest county had weighed in as of Thursday, and in many Central Valley Republican strongholds, like Kern and Tulare counties, where less than a third of voters had already cast ballots.
The “Trump Factor” is clearly motivating voters who are younger or live in the Golden State’s most politically blue regions.
“Right now it seems the Democrats are more juiced than the Republicans because hatred is a stronger emotion than support,” said Jack Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College politics professor.
That’s the case for Wyatt Wartels, who isn’t a fan of the president and voted in early October for Joe Biden. But with California all but a lock for the Democratic ticket, the San Francisco dad has turned his attention to an activity where he thinks he can have greater impact: spending hours calling voters in swing states like Florida.
“I’ve never felt more strongly about the need for change,” he said.
And whether it’s get-outthe-vote efforts or something else, turnout in swing states is approaching 2016 levels. In the Sunshine State, the early vote is already more than 80% of 2016 total turnout, according to the U.S. Elections Project, managed by Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. While the gap between Republican and Democratic voters is smaller there than in California, Democrats are similarly edging out Republicans in early voting.
In battleground Texas, more people have already voted early than voted in 2016, period, although the state does not report party registration data so it’s unclear exactly which voters are weighing in.
“I knew it was going to be strong, but the magnitude of the turnout is surprising nearly everybody, especially in a place like Texas,” Pitney said.
For the 20 states that do report party registration, more than 46% of Democrats have voted compared with roughly 30% of Republicans, according to the project. In California, roughly 39% of Republicans have returned ballots. But that doesn’t mean the state is looking at a drop-off in conservative voters.
“It’s been a huge rush, but it’s not absolutely indicative of a surge in the progressive vote,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., a nonpartisan firm that provides voter information to campaigns and pollsters. “You have a bunch of Republicans holding onto their ballots.”
Traditionally, Republicans have actually been early voters. But this year, Trump and other top GOP officials have suggested, without evidence, that voting by mail is ripe for fraud, prompting many conservatives to make plans to vote in person.
Mitchell worries the lines in California and elsewhere could be long on Election Day. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, many voting centers will have fewer booths and require social distancing, which could mean long waits in places where voters are used to walking right up. Whether that deters any Republicans remains to be seen.
Shupe said the Contra Costa County Republican Party has been encouraging its voters to mail their ballots. But they’re getting some pushback.
“My Republican voters are seeing not just the president 3,000 miles away. In our own county there’s issues,” Shupe said, pointing to the fact that dozens of ballots deposited at a Richmond City Hall drop box recently went missing.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans aren’t as energized, Shupe said. People are turning up to packed fundraisers, like one Oct. 25 in Atherton that featured Ivanka Trump, and calling for yard signs. Whether that translates to a rush of Republican voters on Election Day remains to be seen.
Then there are the state’s roughly 6.5 million independent voters. Approximately 34% have returned their ballots already.
Annette Nielsen, 73, is an unaffiliated voter who went with her daughter, Shadow, to drop their ballots off outside the Santa Clara County registrar’s office in mid-October. The pair snapped photos of each other placing their ballots in the drop box, and Nielsen, who chose the Biden-Harris ticket, said she would post the photos on social media to encourage friends to vote.
“It is different,” the former social studies teacher said. “I am definitely more anxious to vote and have other people vote and hopefully make a change.”
Some voters just have more time to engage in politics or they’re choosing to make time because it feels more important than ever.
Anahid Gregg used to occasionally drive people to the polls when she lived in New Jersey. And she put her ballot in a drop box last weekend, signing up for the state’s ballot tracker system to make sure it arrived safely. But this year especially, the San Jose resident felt compelled to get more involved.
“I just feel like we’re so much better than what’s going on,” Gregg said, adding that as someone whose family friend was lynched in Mississippi in the 1960s, she’s particularly appalled by the racism.
So after work and on the weekends, she wrote more than 200 letters to people in states like Florida and Texas and Pennsylvania encouraging them to vote.
“It was worth giving up the free time,” Gregg said.