Much has been made by the media about the fact that Republican votes will tip the Election Night results to the win column, but only momentarily. It will be a mirage, the media says, because the Democrats are all voting via absentee ballot this year. And those ballots get counted later in most places.
The “red mirage” is how Democrats have framed the expected turnout, and the media is repeating the theme.
But the mirage theory may be just that — a mirage. If enthusiasm could be measured, it’s apparent that the advantage belongs to President Donald Trump.
“There is no Biden in this race,” an Alaska political strategist commented. “There’s Trump. You love him or hate him. Biden is merely a cardboard cutout.”
But those who support Trump may be more enthusiastic than the haters.
In Florida, for example, by the time the early and absentee votes were all counted prior to Nov. 3, Republicans were only 100,000 votes under Democrat votes in the early and absentees. That has put Republicans in a much better position going into Election Day than it did in 2016.
Then, Election Day hit. The first 500,000 vote that came this morning have Republicans dominating Democrats 51-24, a 27 percent vote advantage.
In Miami-Dade County, the Hispanic and Cuban-American vote is turning out heavily for Donald Trump, and in North Florida, it’s clearly Trump country.
Gov. Ron DeSantis says that the turnout has never been this “off” for Democrats in Florida.
Florida is somewhat of a representative state for many and is a must-win for both President Trump and Joe Biden. Florida has voted for the ultimate winner of the presidency since 1996.
In Alaska, Democrats and their candidates Alyse Galvin and Alan Gross made a big push for absentee voting, and have brought in dozens upon dozens of ballot harvesters from around the country to scoop up ballots from people and “hand them in.”
But in the end of early voting, they are just about even with Republicans in absentees, while Republicans have done better than Democrats in the early voting arena. It’s a seesaw.
Now, we drill down into the modeled projections offered by TargetSmart.com, a company that specializes in data.
As of Nov. 2, modeled-Republican voters were 49.3 percent of the vote, with modeled-Democrats at 32.8 percent. This is without the Election Day voters being accounted for.
Compared to the final vote in 2016 and 2018, Republicans are holding a super-strong advantage going into Election Day.
Right now in Alaska, Trump is enjoying enthusiastic voter support, which may bode well for conservative political allies Sen. Dan Sullivan and Congressman Don Young.
And that brings us back to the “red mirage or blue delusion” question.
If Sullivan is up by 11 percent after today’s initial count, it will be hard to see how angry Alan Gross catches him in the absentees.
The TargetSmart model doesn’t support a Gross win under any circumstance — unless those ballot harvesters have been hanging onto thousands of ballots they squeezed from voters, to deliver them today, as part of their strategy to lull Republican activists into thinking their candidates were safe.
More likely is that, in Alaska at least, there won’t be any Republican bounce or Democrat bounce that comes from the absentee votes and the early votes cast between Thursday and Monday, which will be counted with the absentees. We’re seeing a change in voter behavior, but the early and absentee votes are on a seesaw — one goes down, the other goes up.
When it comes to enthusiasm, it’s even harder to measure because of the social pressure from the Left. One young voter in Southeast Alaska commented, “Don’t tell anyone but I voted all Republican. My friends would hate me if they found out.” The shy Republican voter phenomenon will be studied by political scientists for years, as the vitriol from Democrats had reached epic proportions this election cycle.
Polls in Alaska close at 8 pm.
