The New Focus: Early Voting

Today is Election Day. And so is tomorrow. And the day after that.

By the end of September, voters in 30 states will start casting early or absentee ballots in the presidential race — a fact that both poses challenges for the campaigns seeking to make their final pitches as well as raises the stakes between now and Nov. 6.

Absentee ballots have been mailed out in key swing states like North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. In South Dakota and Idaho — firmly red states — early voting began Friday, and in-person early voting in the crucial swing state of Iowa begins this Thursday.

“It’s no longer Election Day; it’s election two months,” said Pete Snyder, the Republican National Committee Victory chairman in Virginia.

Four years ago, just under 40 million people — about 30 percent of the total electorate that year — voted early, and experts expect that number to spike even higher in 2012.

Neither the Obama nor the Romney campaigns are taking any chances. Both are deploying aggressive turnout operations to target early voters and realize that they could make the difference in the tight race. Barack Obama won the early vote in 2008 by encouraging less traditional voters like the young and minority groups to turn out early, and is doing so again. Mitt Romney’s camp says it isn’t focused on any specific demographic groups in its early voting efforts.

Furthermore, the slew of voters casting their ballots this far out from Election Day significantly changes the calculation for campaigns and outside groups making decisions about where to invest their ad dollars. If a campaign or outside group is stockpiling its campaign cash for the final weeks and a third of voters have already voted, those ads won’t make a bit of difference.

And when a good chunk of voters have already cast their ballots before they air, it’s possible that debates won’t have a widespread impact on the electorate.

“Early voting changes your thinking about when you put ads on the air,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said, adding that he thinks on the presidential level ad spending will be consistently high in the final stretch of the election.

The start of early voting also means that the daily tussle of the campaign — whether the release of Romney’s secretly taped 47 percent remarks or the president’s tough Univision interview — is likely to have outsize impact on voters’ decision making. Where once a gaffe may have been ignored or unnoticed, it now may be the last thing a voter remembers before casting his or her ballot.

“When early voting begins, you want your campaign to be firing on all cylinders, be on the offense and have some momentum — which is clearly not where the Romney campaign is right now,” said GOP strategist and John McCain ’08 adviser Steve Schmidt.

In 2008, early and absentee voters made up a substantial portion of the electorate — in some cases, more than half of it. Colorado had the highest number of such voters, with a full 79 percent casting their ballots early. In Nevada, that figure was 63 percent; in North Carolina, it was 61 percent; and in Florida, it was 52 percent.

Early voting used to be largely for people who physically couldn’t make it to the polls on Election Day, such as members of the military, business people who travel frequently for work or seniors who needed assistance getting to the polls.

But that’s changed as early voting becomes increasingly popular and accessible. In 2008, the Obama campaign worked to get traditionally less-reliable demographic groups, like young people and minorities, to vote early — giving Obama an early-vote edge that helped propel him to victory.

And this year, legal battles over early voting are still ongoing in two key states, Ohio and Florida. Republican-led efforts to reduce the number of early voting days in each state have come under fire from voting-rights activists. Ohio’s new restrictions were overturned by a state court, but the state has appealed the decision. Florida’s early voting schedule — reduced to eight days, from 14 in 2008 — is still being challenged by Democrats in the state.

Both sides have already started preparing for the onslaught of voters heading to the polls before Nov. 6, encouraging their supporters to head to the polls early and incorporating early voting education into their ground game in key states.

“Early voting is easy, convenient, and allows more Americans the opportunity to participate in the political process,” said Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher. “By encouraging our supporters to vote early, we can focus our resources more efficiently on Election Day to make sure those less likely to vote get out to the polls.”

“While Mitt Romney and his allies are counting on big ad buys … we’ve made early investments in battleground states — where we’ve been registering folks and keeping an open conversation going with undecided voters for months — to build a historic grass-roots organization that will pay off when the votes are counted,” Fetcher continued.

The Obama campaign’s voter education sites, gottavote.com and gottaregister.com, both feature information about how to register and vote early or how to request an absentee ballot, in each state.

In Iowa, where voters can start in-person early voting on Thursday, state Democrats have been laying the groundwork for higher early turnout since just after the 2010 midterms. Obama won the state in 2008, but it is tightly contested this year.

“Our entire last two years here have been preparing for this moment,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky. “It’s a little bit like the football season: We’ve got the summer training camp, the exhibition and now we’re ready to go.”

The Romney campaign, too, is unveiling what Romney political director Rich Beeson calls the “largest voter contact operation that a Republican presidential campaign has ever undertaken” in order to aggressively turn out Romney supporters early.

“The first stage [of the general election] is the ID phase, second phase is the persuasion phase and third phase is the GOTV phase. We’re sort of in that persuasion phase and GOTV phase right now with folks who have a propensity to vote early and absentee, or are likely to vote early and absentee,” Beeson said. “You can’t just have a 72-hour program anymore … you’ve got to definitely make sure you’re prepared for it and we are.”

Snyder, who runs the Republican Victory operation in Virginia, said the GOP will be pushing supporters to participate in early voting if they qualify and focusing on one-on-one communication with voters in key areas.

“You have an election that is going to be decided by 20,000 or fewer voters — early voting matters,” he said, adding that the GOP is using a “leave-no-stone-unturned approach.”

The stakes are high for both campaigns when it comes to early voting: Failing to place enough emphasis on owning the early vote could put either candidate at a disadvantage before the polls even open on Nov. 6.

Republican ad consultant Fred Davis, who worked with the McCain campaign in 2008, used the recent example of Arizona Rep. Ben Quayle losing his primary to Rep. David Schweikert as proof of the power of early voting.

“Quayle easily won the election on Election Day. What happened? His campaign peaked too late, and 80 percent of the citizens in that district voted early,” Davis said.

“A lot of lessons to be learned from that, but the largest one looming for the presidential contenders might be to treat early voting every bit as importantly as Election Day voting, and remember that the Obama team is masterful at turnout, both early and Election Day.”

Republican strategist Greg Mueller said he expects a heavier advertising presence in states that are beginning early voting.

“It’s important to start increasing the advertising,” he said. “We’re getting ads from both sides ad nauseam.”

Strategists argued that smaller day-to-day events of the campaign, often forgotten in the long term, have more resonance with voters casting their ballot shortly after they occur.

“What happens if you have a moment like Mitt Romney and his private fundraiser?” asked Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “… In the broader context of the election [by Election Day] people say, ‘No, it doesn’t matter, that was five weeks ago.’ If it happens the day before you’re going to cast your absentee ballot, it may be the single thing people think about.”

Beeson disagreed, saying voters will make their choices based on broader issues no matter when they vote.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be filling out an absentee ballot or walking into a polling place and saying, ‘I’m going to be basing my vote on some grainy video I saw of Gov. Romney at a fundraiser,’” the adviser said. “They’re basing their vote on who can strengthen the middle class and create more jobs.”

Republican pollster Ayres said that since early voters tend to be those with their minds firmly made up, a bad week for either candidate can’t dramatically change the outcome of the early voting race.

“My experience with early voting is that the people who vote early tend to be the more committed partisans. They decided long ago who they are going to vote for,” he said.

Schmidt said both campaigns have “extremely smart people” who will be tracking polls and public opinion every day to keep track of where they are in the early voting race.

“You’re going to be polling against it on a nightly basis and you understand what the effect of all this stuff is in real time,” he said. “Both campaigns have extremely smart people doing some really cutting-edge stuff from a targeting perspective.”