Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In effect, Trump just admitted his attacks on mail voting have been a scam all along, designed to help him rig the election. On top of all that, Trump has badly self-owned here by spending months discouraging Republicans from voting by mail, which he now wants them to do.
Michael McDonald: Great to be with you.
“If you have a mail-in ballot, return it immediately and, if not, GO VOTE at the Polls RIGHT NOW. Get everyone you know to VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICAN! Whether you VOTE early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, Republicans must SWAMP the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!
McDonald: Yeah. And it’s really too late, really, for Republicans to be requesting mail ballots. The Postal Service recommends 10 days to have election mail delivered. And so you’d have to have an election office send you a mail ballot, and you’ve got to return it. And so that may not actually be enough time. So even if, like he’s saying, please do this—it’s just simply not enough time now for Republicans to vote by mail.
McDonald: Yeah. And we have states primarily out in the West, but there are others like Vermont and D.C., that have run their elections entirely by mail, in that every active registered voter is sent a mail ballot. So in some places it’s essential that you’re voting by mail. In lots of other places, it’s an option for you to request a mail ballot.
McDonald: Yes, that’s correct. And while we can’t make really good apples-to-apples comparisons everywhere in the country, where I can make those comparisons, it certainly looks like people are voting at higher rates, maybe even higher than, say, the 2018 election, which was the highest turnout rate election for a midterm election since 1914. So we’re looking at really modern historic rates of voting.
McDonald: Yes, it appears, where I can make comparisons to 2018, that turnout is exceeding levels of 2018, which would mean that we are going to have a higher turnout election than 2018.
Let’s start breaking this down by party. What is that 16 million telling you about which party is voting early more and which party is voting by mail more? And what does it mean?
Unaffiliated people, who aren’t affiliated with the party—yeah, they’re up too. You know who’s trailing behind everybody? Republicans. And they’re only up over their previous elections’ turnout in just a couple of states. So it does look like right now that there’s much more enthusiasm on the Democratic side to vote, and even among unaffiliated, than there is among Republicans.
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s not just the mail ballots. We can see it in the in-person early voting that’s going on too. So it’s just like a general malaise among Republicans to participate in this election. And if the polling is correct that we’re going to see a big wave election, this is very consistent with what we would expect to see.
Right now, Democrats are also slightly up in the polling averages in just about all the key Senate races. These are all close, but Democrats do have a small edge. And this includes in a number of red states that Trump won by double digits.
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just a high-level view on it: the Republicans have basically given up on North Carolina, for example. We already know that they withdrew their support, but the early voting numbers there are just abysmal for them. So it looks like, yes, indeed, like the polling, like the political strategists have already determined, North Carolina is off the board for the Republicans—so that means probably, because, you know, it’s kind of a close competitive state.
And that’s, again, both by mail and in person. So it looks like, if those states are going to be competitive, at least the data are there, the votes are there so far, that would make those states competitive.
Sargent: I just want to flag one more number from the New York Times national poll. Democrats lead in the generic House ballot matchup by 54 to 35 among independent voters, which is an extraordinary lead. It’s a 19-point lead.
McDonald: Yeah, it’s absolutely what the Democrats are going to need to win some of these red states. They can’t just rely on Democrats or Republicans showing up. Democrats have to rely also on the unaffiliated moving their direction.
Sargent: So if we’ve got independents breaking by, like, 19 points in Democrats’ favor, this doesn’t really necessarily confirm this for certain, but you’re looking like Democrats are really doing quite well among independents, and independents are voting very energetically early, right?
Sargent: That’s really striking. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what do you take from it? Does it mean maybe that we’re going to see independent turnout kind of off the charts in an overall sense, like in terms of both early voting and Election Day voting?
Again, these are very unusual patterns that we’re seeing, especially where we see Democrats up, unaffiliated up, but Republicans, like, either flatlined or even down in some states. It’s very unusual to see this behavior.
McDonald: Yeah, those are two states where they ask race and Latino or Hispanic ethnicity on their voter registration form, and they report the statistics of who’s voted by race and Hispanic ethnicity. And so we actually have some idea there of what’s happening. And I can see in the data highly engaged Latinos.
And there are a couple of corollaries that emerge from that. One is that if that’s going on in North Carolina and Georgia, it’s likely going on in other states too. And while we don’t have the data in the same way in Texas, you might infer there’s something going on in Texas with Latinos.
Sargent: Well, back to the New York Times poll. In this House generic ballot matchup, the Democrats are leading the Republicans among Hispanics by 61 to 31 points. That is a 30-point edge among Latinos. I’ve got to think you put that together with the unusual level of early voting energy among Hispanics, and that tells a story as well, doesn’t it?
Sargent: OK. So what’s the grand takeaway here, Michael? Things look good, but it would be crazy to get overconfident. Is that the size of it?
So we still have a long ways to go. We have yet to get to Election Day, and it’s going to basically be determined then. Can the Democrats build up enough of a lead in the early vote, which is what they typically do, to withstand what will likely be a very big red day for Republicans on that Tuesday of the election?
McDonald: Yeah, once we get through it all—I mean, we’re seeing these same-day comparisons now, and you can see that Democrats and unaffiliated are much more engaged than Republicans. Is that going to persist? Is it going to go all the way through to, like, the weekend before Election Day?
Sargent: It seems like there’s another positive civic story here unfolding as well, which is that Trump has been threatening to rig the election and steal the election in all kinds of ways. He tried to pass his voter suppression thing to essentially end vote by mail and make it really, really hard to vote.
But now, all of a sudden, here we are. Trump’s Save America Act didn’t happen. His effort to hijack the Postal Service to try and steal the election fell apart, and people are voting, right? I mean, that’s where we are. Like, we’re actually seeing the election start to unfold.
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the good news story here is people are voting, and they’re voting, in some cases for a midterm election, at record numbers. So the system seems to be working as normal as we expect it to work.
And because they’re returning them sooner, if there are any problems with those mail ballots, there’ll be a chance for them to—in the election administration world—cure those deficiencies, and have those ballots counted. But we’re also seeing fewer people request and use mail ballots as well. So they’re shifting into in-person early voting.
But if they’re voting in person, well any of those problems are going to be resolved at the polling place. So those votes are going to be counted more readily than they are by mail.
McDonald: Yeah, it’s probably a net thousands of Democratic votes that are going to show up because of Trump’s rhetoric.
McDonald: Great to be with you.
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