Quote:
Originally Posted by Atocep
North Carolina early voting is looking bad for the GOP. That's one, if Kamala wins, where we'll see plenty of legal shenanigans because the areas hit hardest by the hurricane are trending well behind other areas for early vote turnout and those areas tend to be very red.
I don't see Arizona going Kamala's way. I think Nevada is 50/50.
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I'm not going to wade into most election stuff here, because I think, more important than the result itself, is that we all figure out a way to move forward as a united country afterward.
The 13 counties most affected by Helene gave Trump about 43,000 of the 74,000-vote margin he won by in 2020. So this is a sensitive issue.
That said, North Carolina released statewide mail-in and early-voting totals today (not the vote counts themselves, thankfully) and turnout has averaged 58.7% in those counties, 58.6% in the 15 counties in the emergency zone not as hard hit (Trump had a 204,000-vote advantage in this group) and 54.8% in the 72 counties that were relatively unaffected.
In 2020, overall turnout (including election day) averaged 78.7% in the first group of counties, 78.4% in the second group and 76.4% in the rest of the state.
I think the state has done an incredible job there. More than 100 people died in North Carolina just over a month ago and life is not all that close to back to normal. Voting access is a big part of community, and the state has made it a focus to ensure people can vote.
I can't speak for the entire country or the bajillion lawsuits regarding every aspect of this mess, but in North Carolina, I think the Republicans should be able to say that Raleigh gave a damn about this issue.
I don't have a great sense of tomorrow. It all comes down to whether the "shy Trump voter" phenomenon of 2016 and 2020 was handled properly in the polls this time. Who knows? The pollsters have herded so much in this cycle that it may well have introduced an entirely new type of error. But if I had to lay money on something, and I won't, I'll say whoever wins Pennsylvania wins the election.