#early voting turnout

[whenweallvote]

Early-voting turnout in Texas is off to a hot start. 🔥 More than 840,000 people have cast their ballots in person statewide, almost 100,000 more than 2020!

On top of that, the number of registered voters in Texas grew more than 10% between 2020 and 2024.

What are you waiting for? 🤠 Make your plan to vote and go #VoteEarly at WeAll.Vote/voterhub.

📹 : eureka.dawn.lmti

[my-midlife-crisis]

[andromeda3116]

oh boy if the first day of early voting here is any indication, the turnout this year is going to be huge

[charliezeltzer]

70 Million People Have Cast A Ballot

As of 11/2 70 Million People have early voted either in person or via mail and their ballots have been received and verified.

For reference 73 million people voted for Trump in 2020. We are almost to the halfway point of the total number of ballots cast in 2020. Tomorrow is the last day to In Person Early Vote in New Jersey. Unless voting trickles down tomorrow or election day, this is proving to be the largest Election of our life times (and I'm old AF)

[thashining]

Voter Suppression

[rosielindy]

I’m in line in Franklin, IN to vote early and a woman walked by wearing a Jezebel Spirit T-shirt. I told her I liked it. Gives me hope here in deep red Johnson County! LFG!!!!!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 15, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 16, 2024

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[xcziel]

I VOTED!!

omg y'all it took over an hour and it's still the first week of early voting

(the entrance is under that overhang way up ahead there and the line continues inside)

if you're headed out to vote PLEASE make sure you have comfortable shoes, maybe water and a hat or sun shade, and ALLOW PLENTY OF TIME

[velarisdusk]

there are three things that make me feel patriotic: the olympics, any time NASA does something cool, and when i go to vote

[originalleftist]

In 2020, about 66% of voters turned out- the highest since 1900.

Typically, for several decades, total turnout in Presidential elections has been between 50 and 60%.

As of now, we may well pass 50% turnout BEFORE ELECTION DAY. Just from early/mail voting.

That is fucking astounding.

But keep in mind- this means the other side is likely voting in record numbers too.

[whenweallvote]

Early voting in Georgia started today, and the Peach State is already setting new records! 📈

More than 252,000 voters cast ballots on the first day of early voting, breaking the 2020 record of 136,000. Georgia, you’re crushing it! 🍑

Want to get like them and #VoteEarly? Make a plan to vote now at WeAll.Vote/voterhub.

📹: @NnamEgwuon✍🏾: @kaitlancollins

[my-midlife-crisis]

[mewtatedbunnies]

I voted today!

And there was a huge line

That’s never happened before

[trendynewsnow]

Early Voting Trends and Competitive Landscape in the 2024 Election

Early Voting in Michigan on Sunday Credit…Nick Hagen for The New York Times 75 Million Americans Have Cast Their Votes Early As the nation braces itself for Election Day, an air of determination prevails among voters. Approximately 75 million Americans have already exercised their right to vote during the early voting period. In nine states, over 50 percent of eligible voters have participated…

[rosielindy]

My latest action to help get out the vote in Indiana. So many people write to swing states it’s hard to find a way to make an impact where I live. I found this campaign to send letters to voters up in Northwest Indiana, who are likely to vote blue, just to give them a nudge and to encourage them to spread the word so we can get the majority out to vote. I signed up to write 20 letters to start, hoping to do more and get them all sent out this week. My poor arthritic hand shall not fail me. 😂🌊💙

[calliopechild]

I know it's way too early to be celebrating, but the initial results for the Georgia runoff are looking gooood