Early voting kicks off next week in North Carolina, two months before Election Day, the first in a run of key states where minority voters and young adults who cast ballots in advance could give one of the White House contenders a decisive advantage. For Donald Trump, it’s a major test of whether his recent outreach to non-white groups is translating into votes.
In several swing states, Hispanics, blacks and first-time voters typically have been more likely than whites to cast ballots early — and cast them for Democrats, “We can’t say this will be locked up with early voting, but it can absolutely make a huge difference,” said Marlon Marshall, Hillary Clinton’s director of state campaigns and political engagement”. He continued to mention, “every early voter we get is one less person we need to mobilize on Election Day.”
In the increasingly diverse battleground states of North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia — all must-win states for Trump, except Colorado — it’s minorities in particular who can tip the scales. Early voters are expected to make up between 50 to 75 percent or more of all ballots in the six states, based on 2012 figures.
The Republicans’ get-out-the-vote effort is still significantly behind Clinton’s, which, by contrast, is more than double the size of Trump’s and rivals Barack Obama’s massive 2012 operation. “A campaign with a superior voting operation can make a difference, and right now Donald Trump has shown little sign of organization,” said Ryan Williams, a former senior staffer to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
The Clinton campaign has more than 250 field offices in nine states compared to Trump’s 133 nationwide. In Obama’s historic 2008 race, he ran up such big early voting advantages in four battlegrounds — Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina — that his rival, John McCain, couldn’t catch up, despite winning the Election Day vote in those states, according to AP data.
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