Early voting: Record levels in 2016 may give Clinton edge

Already, more than 6.4 million total voters have cast their ballots in the state – equal to 75 percent of the final turnout in 2012.

“We will decide not only the future of Florida, but of our country and of the homeland we left”, says Christina Hernandez, organizer with Que Vote Mi Gente, to a rally crowd of about 50.

But that’s mostly business as usual in a vote of this scale.

“Donald Trump has just been a lightning rod for new voters and new engagement”, said Steve Slugocki, the chairman of the Maricopa County Democrats in Arizona.

Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie downplayed the impact of increased Hispanic participation, telling reporters on a conference call, “We feel that we’re going to get a good share of those votes”.

In our two Florida polls, registered Hispanic voters represented 13.6 percent of the electorate, but 16 percent of likely voters were self-identified Hispanic voters.

CNBC reported last week an artificial intelligence system designed by a company called Genic.ai that has correctly predicted the winners of the last three US presidential elections was also picking Trump to win.

The highest populations of Latinos in America are in the states of Arizona (33 percent), Florida (24 percent), Colorado (22 percent), New Mexico (49 percent) and Nevada (28 percent), according to 2015 U.S. Census Bureau statistics. More than 70 percent of the ballots are in.

This year, the Republican candidate’s anti-Hispanic rhetoric is driving up Hispanic turnout to his disadvantage.

“North Carolina is the only state that had a decline in African-American participation in early voting“, he said Sunday.

In Wisconsin, turnout shows early voting also on its highest compared to 2012.

Clinton had a slight lead with woman and Trump had a slight advantage with men.

In California, roughly 31 percent of all registered voters are now aged 18-35.

The eventual victor has lost in Nevada only once in the last 26 elections since Republican William Howard Taft defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1908.

A recent poll in the state of OH shows Black turnout is decreasing compared to its 2012 numbers. Again, Clinton leads in early voting, but comparative data suggests that she isn’t doing as well as Obama did in 2012.

All eyes are still on Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and even Virginia, where the results are too close for the media to call the victor based on the vote counts and exit poll data.

In Georgia, where early voting has already exceeded 2012 levels, turnout is up across racial groups.

All of which is to say that despite white women evangelicals’ apparent reluctance to choose Trump, and despite some evangelical leaders’ arguments against Trump, this group in the end didn’t shift much at all. That’s up 12 percent from 2012. White ballots rose from 63 percent to 66 percent.

Trump will bring his wife Ivanka to Michigan Monday, along with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the 2016 vice presidential candidate. So he’d need to win a different state leaning Democratic.

Clinton has over a million people nationally well trained and massive get out to vote ground game that will be energized.

But she and the Democratic Party had at times raised the ire of Latino activists by focusing too heavily on bashing Trump while putting forward less-than substantive efforts to appeal directly to Latinos.

“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton”, FBI Director James B Comey told Congress leaders in a letter after a renewed probe into her use of private email server as secretary of state following a cache of recently discovered emails.