As if 2020 had not frayed nerve endings enough, now begins a season of brain-frying electoral anxiety. As President Trump stokes and amplifies violence in Portland and other cities, and as the Twitterverse obsesses over every twitch in the polls, a calendar of high-wattage media events looms: three Presidential debates, a Vice-Presidential debate, and a slew of live-streamed candidate appearances. It is a season already deformed by Donald Trump’s unhinged speeches and his belief in himself as a producer of populist reality spectacles, and it is plain that the President intends to double down on his basest instincts between now and November 3rd. And it’s not just the members of your own social bubble who think that the stakes in this election are astoundingly high. A record eighty-three per cent of registered voters surveyed this summer by the Pew Research Center believe that it matters greatly which candidate wins—a conviction held equally by partisans in both major parties. (In 2000, the figure was fifty per cent, and the apathy was also evenly split.)
To a significant extent, the voting will be over sooner than you may think. The country appears poised to set a new record for the share of ballots cast early—perhaps well more than half of all votes, through early in-person voting as well as absentee and mail-in balloting. (Each state allows its own mix of methods; some states do much more than others to facilitate early ballots.) That rise will be owing, in part, to citizens seeking to avoid the health risks of Election Day crowds, but it will also mark the extension of an underappreciated trend. Between 2004 and 2016, the share of American voters who cast their ballots before Election Day doubled, from about twenty per cent to forty per cent, as opportunities for early voting expanded in both red states and blue. This year, in response to the emergency of the coronavirus pandemic, many states expanded mail voting for their primaries. The first general-election ballots will be cast in mid-September; among the states that allow voting that early is Michigan, an Electoral College battleground. (Early-vote results are not publicly released until Election Day or afterward.)
The research findings of political scientists suggest that the growth of early and mail voting hasn’t favored one major party over the other, and, before this year at least, it hasn’t greatly affected voter turnout, either. Early voters do tend to be more politically engaged than late voters, the research shows, and so they often have their minds made up and are unpersuadable by fall campaign developments, such as debate performances. (This year, the first Presidential debate is scheduled for September 29th, and the last for October 22nd.) In any event, studies show that “debates have little to no impact on the outcome” of elections, Paul Gronke, the director of the Early Voting Information Center, at Reed College, told me. “The evidence over a very long time,” he said, is that debates merely “reinforce beliefs of those who are already committed, but don’t sway voters.”
Yet voting this year will be different in ways that could alter past patterns, because it will be more risky and, for many people, more difficult than in any recent Presidential election. The pandemic is one reason; another is Trump’s vocal, unabashed campaign of voter suppression, in which he has denounced well-established and secure practices, and spread misinformation about the potential for fraud in mail voting and in the use of drop-off boxes. Last week, Trump tweeted that “fraud and abuse” from mail voting “will be an embarrassment to our Country,” even as the F.B.I., contradicting earlier Presidential tweets, affirmed that it had no evidence of any foreign plot to manipulate mail voting. Trump’s demagoguery is clearly aimed at delegitimizing the election and intimidating voters, and it may also be designed to sway Trump-friendly judges who will decide myriad partisan lawsuits over voting practices. All in all, it constitutes the most blatant use of Presidential power to prevent lawful voting since the days of Jim Crow. Trump and his allies appear to be succeeding, at least in the realm of perception: the Pew survey found that sixty per cent of Biden supporters expect voting to be difficult this fall, while just thirty-five per cent of Trump supporters do.
That gap almost certainly reflects, in part, the long history of obstacles that Democratic voters of color, particularly African-Americans, have faced when trying to exercise their right to vote. But it also suggests that Trump’s tweetstorms and offhand comments are persuading even many white Democrats that they will have a hard time casting their ballots successfully. According to data assembled by the political scientist Michael McDonald, Democrats are already attempting to vote by mail at higher rates than Republicans in battleground states such as Florida. The anxieties of mail-in voters are hardly irrational: the easiest way to vote safely during the pandemic—by mail—also carries heightened risks of disenfranchisement, because the Trump campaign donor recently installed as Postmaster General has overseen a slowdown in mail-delivery times.
“A lot of confusion has been injected into the process because of bad actors,” Nse Ufot, the chief executive of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit working for voter enfranchisement that was founded by Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, told me. Helping low-income voters cast their ballots requires navigating one barrier after another. For example, the state’s Republican governor and legislature have refused to pay for the postage on mail-in ballots, so groups like the New Georgia Project are raising funds to do it. “It is not the work of civil-rights organizations to do the work of government,” she said. “It is not our responsibility to pay for postage . . . and yet that is what we find ourselves doing.”
This spring, Congress authorized four hundred million dollars to support election administration, far less than what some voting-rights watchdogs argue is necessary. Nonprofits are now pouring funds to some states to support government budgets. In July, following the debacle of Wisconsin’s April primary election, when thousands of mailed-in ballots weren’t counted, and Election Day voters endured long lines, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based nonprofit, provided more than six million dollars in grants to five Wisconsin cities, in order to help them prepare for voting this fall. Last week, the center announced a ten-million-dollar grant to the city of Philadelphia, to help it handle a rise in mail voting. (The city’s prior election-administration budget was fifteen million dollars.) Turnout by Philadelphia’s Black voters is vital to the Democrats’ hopes to retake Pennsylvania from Trump, who won the state by just forty-four thousand votes in 2016. Facebook, Google, and major foundations are listed as donors on the center’s Web site, but the center declined to say who specifically funded the recent large grants to cities in battleground states this year.
Such funding is certainly needed, though, for, among other things, allowing election administrators to create multiple paths to the ballot box for voters most at risk of being denied access to it. Democrats have rallied this summer to defend mail-in voting against the President’s attacks, and that is necessary, but “the truth is, vote by mail does not work for every voter,” Hannah Fried, the national campaign director for All Voting Is Local, a campaign housed under the Leadership Conference Education Fund, which works to remove barriers to voting, told me. “African-American voters vote by mail at much lower rates than white voters. Native Americans living on tribal land without a standard address or reliable delivery” of mail can’t rely on that means. “We need options,” Fried said, including ballot-return drop boxes and adequate early in-person polling places.
The effects of the pandemic and Trump’s rhetoric will also be felt on Election Day, of course, when more voters with less firm convictions typically cast their ballots. There is some uncertainty and debate among pollsters and political scientists about both how many truly undecided voters are left in the last weeks of a Presidential election and what affects their behavior. YouGov, which conducts online tracking surveys of the contest between Trump and Biden, reported in late August that about four per cent of respondents were “not sure” which candidate they would vote for, a lower figure than the comparable one in August, 2016, which was seven per cent. Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, told me that self-described undecided voters are such a heterogeneous group that it is probably not helpful to think of them as a single category. She and other political scientists believe that the true number of undecideds could be overstated by polling; some voters tell pollsters that they are independent or undecided even when they are not, because their self-image is that of an open-minded person. But, given that late voters who are truly undecided also tend to be less politically engaged, with all of the confusion and worry this year, “There’s a question of whether, if they’re so undecided so late into the campaign, are they really going to turn out to vote,” Krupnikov told me. “If it’s scary to vote, and you’re not enthusiastic, why put yourself through that?”
In 2016, polls showed that both Trump and Hillary Clinton were unpopular, but late deciders broke for Trump. A likely factor was the infamous letter to Congress that the then F.B.I. director, James Comey, released on October 28th, in which he announced that he was reviewing new information pertaining to Clinton’s e-mail server. This year, if more voters with firm convictions cast their ballots early, and fewer wafflers vote at all, because of the unusually high obstacles, the outcome may be less susceptible to October surprises of the Comey variety. But that doesn’t mean that late voters can’t break one way or another in the last days and tip a close election.
“The gauge of a successful election is that you maximize the turnout of people who want to cast a ballot while maintaining electoral integrity,” Marc Meredith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. The slope to getting there looks very steep in comparison to recent Presidential votes, not least because of the wrecking ball that is our sitting President. Yet that majority of registered Democrats who told Pew that they expect voting to be difficult may nonetheless be determined to overcome the barriers. “My reading is that we are on a path that will likely lead to extraordinarily high voter participation,” Ufot, of the New Georgia Project, said. Despite the pandemic, suppression tactics, and administrative screwups during the June primaries, Georgians voted in record numbers. Since then, a summer of civil-rights protests against police shootings of unarmed Black people, Ufot said, has galvanized many voters who might otherwise have stayed on the sidelines, out of apathy or caution about their health. Trump is calculating that the protests could also galvanize law-and-order voters, but fifty-six per cent of respondents to a YouGov Internet poll released on Wednesday said that they believe violence at protests will worsen if the President is reëlected, whereas a plurality of forty-three per cent said that it would get better under a President Biden.
Krupnikov, whose research often focusses on the psychology of voters, has been working recently on “affective polarization,” a political-science term for the rising antipathy between Democrats and Republicans. Political scientists have found that polarized voters are often highly engaged and among the most likely to vote. Yet, at the same time that polarization has intensified, there has also been “more harnessing of people’s social networks, and not just Internet-based ones,” she said. “If you have somebody who is very interested in politics, who is your friend, now you’re more likely to vote,” too. In this time of manufactured disinformation and rational health anxiety, that insight about the role of personal trust networks suggests a more constructive course than pharmaceuticals for managing anxiety until the election: Round up persuadable friends, neighbors, and relatives, and, one way or another, get their ballots in.
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