What AP Votecast tells us about American’s priorities
Maanvi Singh
The Guardian’s Maanvi Singh reports:
Only 37% of Americans said the country is on the right track, with 63% saying it was on the wrong track, per the Associated Press’s Votecast project.
AP Votecast is not quite an exit poll – it’s a set of national surveys conducted in the lead into and through the times that voting closed. The polls are conducted nationally and in key states, and include about 140,000 people.
The finding about whether the country is on the right track is in line with approval ratings for Donald Trump: about 44% approve of the president and 56% disapprove. More than 50% of those surveyed disapproved of the president’s handling of the pandemic, and 35% said he would be better able to handle the crisis than Biden.
These survey results don’t show how voters ended up voting – but they do give a broad picture of what voters were thinking about as they made their choices.
The AP surveys show that about 15% of voters who cast ballots this year didn’t vote in 2016. That’s in line with predictions from Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida, who is predicting a turnout rate of 67%. The US is on course to hit the highest turnout rate in more than a century.
A popular legal assistance hotline has seen an increase in complaints about voter intimidation and electioneering compared to previous elections, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
But this increase is still better than what the group, and other civil rights organizations, had been bracing for in the run up to the election.
The committee’s president and executive director, Kristen Clarke, said: “There have been issues and there may be issues as we move into the final hours of the election, but no doubt we have been bracing for the worst.”
📣STAY IN LINE!📣
If you're in line before the end of polling hours, you can STILL cast a ballot after polling hours end. Don't get out of line!
— Kristen Clarke 866-OUR-VOTE (@KristenClarkeJD) November 4, 2020
As of 6.50pm ET, the committee had fielded about 30,000 calls to its Election Protection hotline, which provides free information and assistance to Americans who encounter problems while voting.
The second-most common complaint voters made to the hotline were about intimidation and electioneering, with the most popular complaints concerning ID requirements and registration issues.
However, Clarke emphasized that voter intimidation on election day has so far not been “at the scale and level of intensity that we expected”, given the reports of increased militia activity and efforts over the summer to silence Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
“While we have seen these complaints, in many instances they are lone wolf individuals, maybe two people, but not large groups that would otherwise have a stark chilling effect on the electorate,” Clarke said. “And I think many voters this season have come out determined.”
Clarke cautioned that this could be the “calm before the storm,” and that the committee was bracing for issues about whether absentee ballots were properly handled and counted in the coming days.
Lewis Kendall reports from Graham, North Carolina:
I’ve spent the last couple hours in Graham, where on Saturday local law enforcement twice used pepper spray on a crowd during a march to the polls.
Several hundred gathered this afternoon in response to Saturday’s incident, which targeted children and caused a seizure in an eldery woman, according to a lawsuit against the Alamance county sheriff and Graham police chief that was filed on Monday.
Organizer Rev Greg Drumwright spoke to the audience, which packed the parking lot of a local church. He told the story of a participant in Saturday’s march who attended in order to register to vote. The man was unfairly arrested, Drumwright said, and missed his chance to register because he was in jail. The last day to register in North Carolina was Saturday.
“That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’re marching today,” Drumwright said. “We’re standing for the right of all people to be able to vote.”
The group walked through the streets of Graham for about an hour, without incident.
Supporters of Joseph Biden march for voting rights past supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump carrying Confederate flags in Graham, North Carolina. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters
Elsewhere, the state board of elections announced it would be extending voting at several polling sites across North Carolina due to late openings, machine malfunctions and operator errors. At least 10 sites in Cabarrus, Guilford, Sampson and Warren counties will now close later than the statewide 7.30pm cutoff.
Last-minute extensions are common on election day, board officials said, but they may delay how soon the state reports some of its numbers.
McConnell was widely expected to win reelection in the safely Republican state of Kentucky, but that did not stop Democrats from throwing money at McGrath in recent months.
But the real question remains: will McConnell keep his title of Senate majority leader, or will Democrats flip control of the chamber?
Trump picks up four states while Biden wins seven others
With polls closing in many states moments ago, the AP has just made a flurry of calls in the presidential race.
Joe Biden has won seven states, including his home state of Delaware. The Democratic nominee won Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, Delaware and Connecticut.
Home to Fort Worth and its suburbs, the typically red stronghold went for Donald Trump by 8.6-points four years ago. But in 2018 it narrowly backed rising Democratic star Beto O’Rourke’s failed bid for the US Senate.
On top of the presidential race, a down-ballot contest for sheriff has captured outsized attention as one of the “key criminal justice races” in the nation, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Denton county
Trump won this north Texas county handily in 2016, by 20 points. But two years later, O’Rourke ate into that overwhelming Republican support when he lost Denton by just over eight points.
During early voting this election, 67.4% of Denton’s more than 565,000 registered voters cast a ballot in an incredible show of voter enthusiasm, lapping the state’s already impressive turnout rate of around 57%.
Nueces county
Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, is “seeing a lot of enthusiasm” in his touristy beach town’s home county.
O’Rourke flipped Nueces in 2018, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here by 1.5 points. The county is almost two-thirds Hispanic or Latino, and by the end of early voting, over half of registered voters had already turned out.
A house projects a television monitor showing election results in Houston, United States. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
The county’s almost 2.5 million registered voters swung Democratic in 2016, by more than 12 points. O’Rourke claimed victory here by over 16 points two years later.
Hidalgo county
Who’s going to be favored in the overwhelmingly Latino community at the US-Mexico border isn’t exactly a mystery: Clinton won here by more than 40 points four years ago. The real question is whether voters have turned out on election day. By the end of early voting, just under half of the county’s nearly 400,000 registered voters had cast a ballot, lagging behind other parts of the state.
Trump was expected to win the state, but South Carolina’s key Senate race between Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham and Democrat Jaime Harrison remains too close to call.
