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Votes Trump Polls

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In North Carolina …

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Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

If African-Americans manage to turn out at presidential-year levels-if they’re at least 21 percent of the electorate-Hagan will probably win, says Tom Jensen, director of the North Carolina-based polling firm Public Policy Polling.

That’s why the Hagan campaign, and its coordinated get-out-the-vote organization Forward North Carolina-along with the NAACP, state Democrats, and get-out-the-vote outfits-launched unprecedented efforts this year to mobilize black voters. […]

As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That’s up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

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WaPo interviews DSCC director Guy Cecil about  the Senate: “There is a path to victory in every state”

Our job for the next six days is to win this election. It is not to figure out whether somebody should have been more or less involved. I believe that if the DSCC and our candidates and our allies stay focused on that, we have a shot. Despite the map, despite turnout, despite the midterms, we are in a position – doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed; doesn’t even mean it’s the most likely – to hold the majority. […]

We will end up somewhere between $60 and $65 million in our targeted states that is either transfered or raised by the DSCC or our candidates. Last week we knocked on 143,000 doors in Colorado. We have registered tens of thousands of voters in a number of states.

Turnout is required but not sufficient. We must engage in trying to change the electorate.

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This may not be the election that finally turns the tide but we are rapidly approaching that time. Gary Younge in the Guardian:

Republicans should temper their joy is because the Senate races reveal their national vulnerabilities. Of the 10 states considered toss-ups this year, Mitt Romney won seven and Obama won three in 2012. Obama won those races by 6% or less; Romney won all but two of his by more than double digits. Put bluntly, it shouldn’t even be close. But while Democrats are struggling in swing states that are supposed to be tough, like Iowa, Colorado, New Hampshire and North Carolina, Republicans are in trouble in Georgia, which has not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1992. Meanwhile it has given up on states where they need to be competitive if they are to win back the White House, like Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. […]

Take Georgia. The party’s core here, as elsewhere, is white men, married white women, evangelical Christians, the elderly and rural voters – only more so because it is in the south. All these categories but one are in decline. In the past decade the proportion of white registered voters in Georgia has declined from 72% to 59%; the Hispanic population here increased by 96% between 2000 and 2010 and Hispanic voter registration in that time increased by 400%; since 1990 the state’s rural population has fallen from 31% to 25%.

True, the population is ageing, but it is also dying out. Three-quarters of active registered voters over the age of 65 in Georgia are white, which is true for just under a third of those under 30. In short, thanks in no small part to their policies on everything from immigration reform to gay marriage, with each election cycle the Republican party needs to get more votes from fewer voters.


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19 comments

  2. JanF

    Georgia:

    At 33.1 percent of early votes cast, black balloters nearly match their turnout of 2012, when President Barack Obama was up for re-election. Black voters then cast 29.2 percent of early ballots.

    Iowa

    Data mining of more than 450,000 records reveals nearly 60,000 ballots cast so far this year by Iowans who didn’t vote in 2010. Almost 25,000 have been cast by Democrats, compared to more than 17,000 by Republicans.

    This race is tied so it won’t take much. 50%+1.

    North Carolina

    … over 800,000 votes have been cast so far in the election and 47% were cast by registered Democrats. Registered Republicans account for about 32% of North Carolina’s early votes.

    … at least 130,000 more votes have been cast in 2014 compared to the same period in 2010, even though there were seven additional days of early voting that year. Also, more unaffiliated voters and black voters who did not participate in 2010 are hitting the polls this election.

  3. Diana in NoVa

    Take Georgia. The party’s core here, as elsewhere, is white men, married white women, evangelical Christians, the elderly and rural voters – only more so because it is in the south.

    I’m an old, married, Caucasian female who can remember when women died from self-induced, botched abortions and back-alley abortions. I’m considered “elderly,” I suppose, and I can remember all the way to the year 2005, when Rethugs were talking about reducing Social Security, privatizing it, and what have you.

    How can anyone old, married, and FEMALE vote Rethug?  It’s a mystery to me. Or are they so brainwashed they vote the way their husbands do? At our house, I’m the one who bloody well tells the rest of the family how to vote. In fact, I am sending out an e-mail this very day to the other 7 members about that.

  6. JanF

    Record-breaking ‘Souls to Polls’ turnouts Sunday in South Florida

    WEST PALM BEACH – A get-out-the-vote drive that encouraged minority voters to cast their ballots Sunday saw record-breaking turnout Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties – three of the largest and heavily Democratic counties in the state.

    Statewide vote totals for the two-weeks of early voting – won’t be known until number-crunchers for both parties finish analyzing data to determine whether “Souls to the Polls” brought in enough ballots to close the GOP’s 125,000 vote advantage.

    After the 2010 teaparty wave election, ALEC voter suppression rules were signed into law and early voting was cut by 6 days including Sunday voting.

    Long lines with waits up to eight hours at polling places in 2012 made Scott the target of criticism and Florida the butt of election jokes. Last year, lawmakers reversed the election law and gave supervisors of elections the power to decide how many days and how many hours early polling sites would be open.

    This year, Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher decided to allow early voting for 12 hours a day during the two weeks before the election, including “Souls to the Polls” Sunday. Eleven other counties offered early voting on Sunday, including Broward and Miami-Dade, which are among the largest in the state and known to have a substantial number of minority voters who are registered Democrats.

    What is interesting to me is that even when people were confronted with long lines they still came out to vote and Florida helped re-elect Barack Obama. It may be too late for the Republican Party to undo the damage to their brand done by the voter suppression tactics inspired by ALEC Model Legislation. When they made it more difficult to vote, folks found a way to vote. And despite weasel words from weasel Rand Paul, they will not soon forget which party wanted to restrict the franchise.

  7. JanF

    I hope there is a serious backlash against ALEC poster child Kris Kobach, Secretary of State and chief vote suppressor of Kansas.

    Kansas instituted a proof-of-citizenship requirement for state elections (federal elections cannot add that extra requirement and will have a separate ballot).

    More than 21,000 Kansans’ voter registrations in suspense because of proof of citizenship

    Statewide, 12,327 people who identified as unaffiliated had their registrations suspended because of lack of proof of citizenship, compared with 4,787 who identified as Republicans, 3,948 who identified as Democrats and 361 who identified as Libertarians. […]

    Because of a move, apparently, [DeAnna] Allen was affected by a law that went into effect Jan. 1, 2013, that requires people registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport.

    She left Kansas in 2004 and came back in January 2013. She registered to vote when she went to get her driver’s license.

    After she attempted to vote in the primary, “I got a letter saying I needed to give them my birth certificate.

    When she OFFICIALLY registered, she registered as “unaffiliated”.

    Kobach has an opponent in Tuesday’s election, Democrat Jean Shodorf (former Republican) who thinks this was a solution in search of a problem and that the state should make it easier for people to vote, not harder.

    But when citizens have problems registering to vote, Schodorf said, the state “needs to take the responsibility and help citizens maneuver through this red tape.”

    “I have people telling me about the problem of trying to go through this minefield of documents when they have voted their whole lives,” she said.

    “Right now they are presumed guilty by Kris Kobach, and they have to prove their innocence.”

  8. JanF

    Sam Wang linked to this interesting article in the Huffington Post about Hidden Errors and Overconfident Pollsters.

    First, all the polls can promise is about a 3% MOE which, as we know, many races are well within. Plus despite efforts to pooh-pooh it, there is a Republican bias. Here are two points:

    Democrats are more likely than Republicans to have a cell-phone from a different area code than where they currently live (like all three of the authors of this article), which in turn results in coverage error since such individuals cannot be included in state-level polls. Cohn notes that among cell-phone only adults, people whose area code does not match where they live lean Democratic by 14 points, whereas those that matched lean Democratic by 8 points. For an example of non-response and survey error, Cohn notes that Hispanics who are uncomfortable taking a poll in English are more likely to vote Democratic than demographically similar Hispanics.

    So if a pollster is randomly picking cell phone numbers in the area code of a state race, they will skip some Democratic voters. And if they do reach a Hispanic voter (who, according to the story tend not to answer cell phone calls from people who they don’t know), they may not be willing to answer the questions.

    The big takeaway, though, is that the poll aggregations will smooth out statistical noise but will NOT weed out the bias.

    So PLEASE encourage people to vote … and have their preference tabulated by a voting machine in the only poll that matters.

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