WHY VOTING EARLY HELPS DEMOCRATS, by Kris Moe

Once ballots go out in an election everything is about Getting Out The Vote (GOTV). Earlier on in campaigns, they are doing two things to prepare for GOTV operations:

1. Trying to persuade voters to vote for their candidate/party

2. Trying to identify who is most likely to vote for their candidate (and who will not)

These activities produce lists of voters whom campaigns need to get to the polls to actually vote. This is happening on every campaign from a local clerk and recorder race up to a presidential race.

Once ballots go out campaign volunteers and precinct captains will be calling, texting and knocking on the doors of people on their lists multiple times. But the list gets shorter as more people vote. The parties and campaigns get updated lists from the local election office which says whose ballots have already been received. That is an awesome tool. For a precinct captain who has to contact 600 voters originally, if half of them vote early, then the the precinct captain only needs to contact the 300 voters who haven’t voted yet. That saves the precinct captain a lot of time. After the second round of contacting, hopefully more vote.

In the end, the voters who wait to vote on election day will be contacted by their precinct captain 3 times, the state Democratic party multiple times, the Biden campaign multiple times, the Hickenlooper campaign multiple times and all the local Democrats several times. Now if we all just voted early, the volunteers on these campaigns could spend their time persuading low propensity voters to vote instead of getting us to the polls.

No campaign has enough money or enough volunteers to contact everyone multiple times. But the earlier we Democrats vote, the more the party can do with their limited resources. We want to use those resources to reach unlikely voters not people who plan to vote.

So if you want Democrats to win in 2020, vote the day you get your ballot and you’ll be helping us win up and down the ballot!