Political parties intensify focus on early voting

DES MOINES - Iowa Republicans celebrated last week, calling it an 'historic milestone” when, for the first known time, they ended a day in the election cycle with more early votes cast than Democrats.

Urging voters to cast their ballot before Election Day is the new norm for political campaigns. In fact, it's not really Election Day any longer; in states where early voting is allowed, it's more like Election Month.

'There's no question that early voting has changed the dynamics of campaigns in some really significant ways, particularly so in these off-year elections,” said Jeff Boeyink, who managed Terry Branstad's successful 2010 campaign for Iowa governor and is now senior vice president of a Des Moines government affairs and public relations firm.

More than 4 out of 10 Iowa voters are expected to vote early this year. Iowans have been able to cast votes - either by mail or in person at county auditor's offices and other satellite locations - since Sept. 25, nearly a month and a half before the Nov. 4 Election Day.

During that time, both parties have been sweeping the electorate, prodding people to cast their vote early.

To campaigns, early votes mean locked-in votes. Parties also use the early voting period to identify and secure votes from people who support the party but are unlikely to head to the polls on Election Day or to identify persuadable voters and encourage them to vote before they change their minds.

'Campaigns spend an awful lot of time now in their ground game organized around getting those votes cast,” said Arthur Sanders, a political science professor at Drake University.

Early voting has largely been a tool employed by Democrats in recent elections, while Republicans counted on their traditionally high Election Day turnout.

But after seeing the impact Democrats made targeting voters in 2012, Republicans in Iowa decided it was time for a change in strategy. In 2014, the state party has dramatically increased its early voting efforts.

It appears to have paid off. On Wednesday, for the first known time, Republicans had more early votes cast than Democrats. Daily data released by the Iowa Secretary of State showed that as of Wednesday 105,347 registered Republicans had cast early ballots compared to 104,984 cast by registered Democrats.

'Republicans learned important lessons in 2010 and 2012 and have turned a historical deficit into a tactical strength going into Election Day 2014,” read a memo sent by Mark Stephenson of campaign consulting firm Cardinal Insights to various Iowa Republican organizations and campaigns. 'Republicans should be proud of their efforts in the state to this point; however, their work is far from done.”

The same day's data showed Democrats led Republicans in ballots requested by nearly 2,000.

Republicans, however, appear to be closing the gap in both early ballot requests and returns. Comparing numbers two weeks out from Election Day in 2010 to 2014, Democrats have increased early ballot requests by 26 percent and returns by 21 percent, but Republicans have increased requests by 39 percent and returns by 54 percent.

Either way, those numbers tell only a portion of the story. The key is not just how many early votes each party is casting; more important is whether those early votes are cast by people who may not have otherwise voted in the election.

In other words, if a party is convincing to vote early mostly people who would have voted on Election Day anyway, that party is not really gaining an advantage. That is often referred to as 'cannibalizing” Election Day votes.

But if a party finds supporters who were undecided about voting and gets those people to vote early, those are critical pick-ups.

Both parties say they have data that shows they are making early voting inroads with supporters who did not vote in 2010 or 2012. Experts say we won't know the full truth until the votes are counted.

Either way, campaigns are pleased to find early votes of any kind, for a multitude of reasons, Sanders said.

'The key for campaigns is that when you can check off these people as already having voted, it narrows down the number of people you have to work on getting to the polls on Election Day. And so you can more efficiently spread out your resources on Election Day, where again you're going to have another very big push to get people on your side to vote,” Sanders said. 'The early voting makes that a more targeted focus.”

Early voting also has affected the way candidates campaign, experts say. People who have paid attention to Iowa's open-seat U.S. Senate race between Democrat Bruce Braley and Republican Joni Ernst may not be surprised to learn early voting has in some ways made the most active portion of campaigns longer.

'I think what you end up having is most candidates, particularly in an open Senate seat like you have in Iowa, they are campaigning hard for months,” said John Hudak, a fellow in governance studies at the nonprofit public policy research Brookings Institution. 'I think there is a realization that the home stretch is a lot longer in a state with early voting.

'If I was advising a candidate, and I'm not, but if I was advising a candidate, the week before early voting begins - that's when you start treating it like it's Nov. 3. You have to stretch that ferocity and that energy and that passion out with the assumption that everyone you speak to at this rally is voting tomorrow.”