The Early Voting Riddle

This week, we’ve heard political pundits intone, “Eight days to Election Day,” “A week to Election Day,” and so on.  Actually, it already is Election Day.  Early voting has started in the three “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that polls indicate is Vice President Kamala Harris’ most likely path to an Electoral College victory.  What I will go to bed wondering every night between now and November 5 is whether, by how much, and in which direction early voting impacted the outcome of the election.

This campaign has had the ebbs and flows of a classic NFL football game.  The MAGAs jumped out to a substantial early lead, and seemed to be coasting to victory against the President Joe Biden-led Democrats; the Democrats brought in a replacement quarterback, Ms. Harris, and staged a furious comeback for over a month that brought the teams even; then – while others might differ, I would place it at the Vice Presidential debate, in which MAGA Vice Presidential Candidate U.S. OH Sen. J.D. Vance is generally credited with besting Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate MN Gov. Tim Walz — the Democrats’ offense seemingly stalled while the MAGAs continued to grind out their propaganda, and over the last month the Trump-Vance ticket appeared to have crept back ahead by about a field goal.  Now, in the figurative last two minutes of the game, the Democrats seem to be back on the march.

By all appearances, the MAGAs are supremely confident – putting aside my obvious sympathies for Ms. Harris, I’d venture that from an objective standpoint, they seem over-confident.  Frankly, I don’t know how they can be; just going by the majority of presidential elections in this century, as Americans gravitated to cell phones and became ever more distrustful of pollsters, nobody’s numbers have been that precise in closely-contested elections.  Two factors have arguably helped the Democrats regain ground in the last couple of weeks:  first, inflation, a serious concern to perhaps a pivotal number of swing state voters, continues to ebb and what I believe are the last major economic indicators to be released before the election demonstrate a continually improving U.S. economy with strong job numbers; and second — staying away from the despicable substance, and speaking strictly in terms of political handicapping – there have been former President Donald Trump’s inexplicable and egregious unforced errors so late in the campaign:  expanding his execrable rhetoric about immigrants to labeling American citizens who disagree with him as “enemies within,” compounded by the Trump Campaign’s Madison Square Garden rally this past Sunday, in which a so-called comedian declared, Latinos “love making babies. There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country,” and “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”  If that wasn’t enough, the so-called comedian also made an allusion to a black man and a watermelon, another rally speaker referred to Ms. Harris as the “Anti-Christ,” and yet another referred to her “pimp handlers.”  Trump aide Stephen Miller declared, “America is for Americans” – seemingly not quite as loathsome until one remembers that Mr. Miller’s remarks echoed similar declarations at a Nazi rally in the old Madison Square Garden in 1939.  I am not a fan of horror movies, so I may have these references wrong, but it seems like Mr. Trump has removed a smiling mask of himself (itself hard enough to imagine 😉 ) to reveal the fictional Freddy Krueger underneath.  These later incidents have perhaps – finally — created determinative doubts among the former president’s softest supporters who had been heretofore very reluctantly planning to vote for him.

My gut tells me that every day between now and Election Day will help Ms. Harris.  In a razor-thin race, timing is everything.  MSNBC’s Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough has mentioned a number of times over the years that Mr. Trump indicated to him after winning the presidency in 2016 — when the two men were still talking – to the effect that if 2016 Election Day had been a week sooner or a week later, Mr. Trump would have lost.  Similarly, some will recall that AR Gov. President Bill Clinton beat then-President George H.W. Bush by criticizing Mr. Bush for an economic recession that economists later concluded had ended before Election Day 1992.

The political maxim has always been that early voting helps the Democrat; a relatively larger share of Democratic voters have traditionally been less motivated to cast ballots than Republicans, and were also more likely to have conflicting commitments on Election Day which interfered with their voting, so the longer voting period helped Democratic turnout.  (At least in 2020, Mr. Trump seemed to ascribe to this theory and disparaged early voting.  While his pronouncements may have cost him some votes, I’ve seen no reports indicating that he lost enough votes in any swing state to have changed any such state’s outcome.)

This year, we’ll see.  Assuming that Ms. Harris has regained some slight momentum, what I wonder is whether it will carry her far enough, and the riddle I ponder is whether early voting helps her or hurts her.  Conventional wisdom would hold that if the early votes were tallied today, she would win handily and that if Mr. Trump ultimately prevails, it will be because he stages a “comeback” on Election Day.  But at the same time, I would submit that virtually all of the votes she’s “banked” would have registered on Election Day anyway against as polarizing a figure as Mr. Trump, and am wondering whether early voting might have cost her the votes of some moderately conservative Republican suburban women and Latinos who might have shifted to her – or in any event, not voted for Mr. Trump — had they had another week to consider Mr. Trump’s and his surrogates’ hateful, racist, anti-American rhetoric.

What you’ve just read is clearly idle speculation, which you may easily dismiss.  On one hand, one can justifiably point out that moderately conservative suburban women – the “hidden women’s vote” that so many liberal pundits wistfully allude to and fervently hope exists – and the Latino community – which Democrats have been too slow to recognize is not a monolithic block – have had nine years to figure out that Mr. Trump is a blackguard, and one more week wouldn’t have made any difference to how they voted; on the other hand – while of course deferring to two accomplished psychologists that read these pages 🙂 – one might argue that Ms. Harris still has time to nudge these potentially decisive voters to her side, because anybody truly unsure about an important decision will generally wait as long as possible before proceeding, so any citizen who has been truly torn about which presidential candidate to vote for hasn’t yet voted.

We’ll see what happens.  Once one has voted, there is little to do except idly speculate … and make Noise  😉 .