High level of early voting in the United States fuels all hopes

Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba Archives Agence France-Presse People vote at a public library converted into an early voting station in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on October 29, 2024.

Marion Thibaut – Agence France-Presse in Washington

Published at 8:50 a.m.

• United States

More than 57 million American voters have already cast their ballots and this exceptional early turnout for the American election is fueling the hopes of both camps, even if it remains difficult to interpret.

While surveys still show the two candidates neck and neck five days before the election, Democrats and Republicans alike continue to call on voters to get to the polls as soon as possible.

Even though on the subject, candidate Donald Trump has sent contradictory messages.

On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris' running mate, and former President Barack Obama have staged their early voting, calling on voters to do the same.

This is now the equivalent of a third of the total number of voters in the 2020 election who have already cast their ballots.

In Georgia, for example, more than 3 million people voted, or 45% of registered voters, a record, according to Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State.

A situation that is found in several other swing states, those states that are decisive for the final victory, such as North Carolina.

It is an “important election” for the state of “democracy,” explained to AFP Brad Hines, a voter from Wisconsin, who lined up to cast his ballot in person on the day voting opened. anticipated.

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“I wanted to go vote and let everyone know that they had to do the same thing,” adds this 73-year-old retired police officer.

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Gender gap

“The perception that voters have of the candidates is very marked” and explains the high turnout, Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University, told AFP.

This vote is in any case a godsend for the campaign teams, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, who closely follows the early vote.

“Every one of those early voters is someone that the campaign is removing from their rolls, and every voter that they remove from their rolls is someone that they don’t have to contact anymore,” he explained in a podcast.

But he said the early voting is unlike anything in previous years, making it hard to make projections.

According to figures compiled by his lab for six states—Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia—women make up about 55 percent of the early vote, compared to 45 percent for men.

That’s a result that makes Democrats smile, though it’s impossible to say whether it will hold up in the future. the election.

In the polls, Kamala Harris, who has made defending abortion one of her strong campaign themes, is counting heavily on the women's vote. And she even hopes to convince moderate conservatives to join the Democratic camp thanks to this theme.

For their part, Republicans point out that according to surveys, more and more of their supporters are voting early. The gap shows that, unlike in previous elections, there are barely more of them among Democrats — 39% against 36%.

At a meeting on Wednesday evening, Republican candidate Donald Trump welcomed the “historic record in early voting” and the surge of Republicans in this contingent.

One thing is certain, this vote has not finished being scrutinized: investigations have been opened in recent days after the burning of several ballot boxes in the states of Washington and Oregon and in Arizona, on the Pacific coast.

In addition, the high rate of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, where ballots cannot be processed before election day, could delay the announcement of results nationwide.