With early voting poised to play a bigger role in this year’s election, Hillary Clinton was urging voters in Iowa to start casting ballots on Thursday, more than five weeks before Election Day.
Clinton’s 10-city tour of Iowa brought the Democratic presidential nominee back to a state where she eked out a win in the caucuses over Bernie Sanders. With her focus now on defeating Donald Trump, Clinton was hoping that putting an emphasis on early voting could help her replicate President Barack Obama’s successful strategy in the battleground state four years ago.
More than 4 in 10 Iowa voters cast early ballots in 2012, and Clinton’s campaign is hoping that even higher interest in early voting this year will give her a decisive edge.
Early voting — either by mail or with voting booths that are open before election day — has been on the rise in the United States. It’s a way to increase voter turnout, especially for Americans who have difficulties making it to the polls on Nov. 8.
Other states have already begun in-person early voting, but Iowa is getting attention because it’s the first battleground state to do so. That means it’s among a dozen states that are not reliably Democratic or Republican, so can sway the outcome in the state-by-state presidential vote.
For Clinton, the early voting strategy is key to any prospects she may have for pulling off victories in states like Arizona and Georgia. Both states traditionally vote Republican in presidential races, but Democrats hope that the growing Hispanic populations and Trump’s unpopularity could alter the calculus this year.
In Des Moines, Clinton planned a speech focused on childcare challenges faced by middle-class families. It’s a traditionally Democratic issue that Trump has taken on recently, prompted largely by interest from his daughter, Ivanka.
The Republican nominee was holding a rally Thursday in New Hampshire, a day after Clinton campaigned there with Sanders in an appeal to young voters. Brushing off harsh critiques of his performance in the first presidential debate, Trump appeared to be sticking with his strategy of focusing on the loyal base of working-class voters whose enthusiasm has driven his campaign.
In a reminder of how far this year’s presidential campaign has veered into baffling territory, third-party candidate Gary Johnson was being ridiculed after he was unable, in a television appearance, to name a single world leader he admired. The awkward moment drew immediate comparisons — including by Johnson himself — to his “Aleppo moment” from earlier in the month when he didn’t recognize the besieged city in Syria.
“I’m having a brain freeze,” Johnson said Wednesday.
(AP)
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One Response
I realize that it is considered quaint to care about such things, and it certainly fashionable among the Leftists to pretend that we’re living in their new world order where voting (for them) should be mandatory (and thus their position on illegal aliens flooding our borders or using proper ID to prevent voter fraud), but the Constitution expressedly gives a specified day (singular) for voting. and I’m unaware of any properly ratified amendments to said document that ever lawfully changed that.
enjoy your banana republic!