Inside Skinny on What Trump's Friday Visit to Mesa, AZ is REALLY All About

[PandoraAwakened]

18. Actually...

Per the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (and many other sources where you can find this info.), early ballot voting for Arizona is around 75%, not 90% as you say.

As of this very moment, the AZ Secretary of State's online Early Ballot Dashboard, which is updated daily, shows only 204,889 early ballots in as of 10-18-18 (8 days after ballots were sent out). The total number of Arizonans casting votes in the 2016 General Election was 2,661,497 (per the state's SOS office) or 2,722,660 (per the federal EAC), whichever one you choose to believe. The larger point being, this means there's a lot of Early Ballots yet to come for 2018 to reach the 75% achieved in the past.

I'm curious whether you have a source you can cite for your belief that early ballots here are cast "in the first 48 hours" and that "most people have voted." I'm just not aware of any studies having ever been conducted in Arizona that support those suppositions. I think it is especially important in today's fact-free political environment that we try our hardest to stick with the facts.

Additionally, it is actually a common mistake to correlate "early ballot voting" with actually occurring "early," at least the way it works in Arizona. For example, I'm on the Permanent Early Ballot List in Arizona. Now, I certainly have the option to mail that ballot in anytime after I've received it. However, in the last General Election, I simply dropped it off on election day at my designated polling site. The benefit in having the Early Ballot is that I don't have to wait in any lines at the polling site. I just walk up and drop it in. In and out in about 2 minutes. I could have, of course, also done this at any one of a number of designated drop points on any day up to the election. Or, I could have mailed it in. The primary point here for Arizona is that just because it's labeled "early" doesn't mean it has to get there early.

Another benefit to having the Early Ballot is to give yourself the opportunity to research everything, before returning it by whatever means and on whatever day all the way up to the election. In Arizona, we always have a ton of judges on the ballot up for Yes/No retainer (51 this time around!) and the ballot gives no indication of their political parties, i.e. their judicial ideology, so you have to look all that up. There are also a number of other "nonpartisan positions" on the ballot relative to elected water conservation and school officials, etc. Plus, there's always the deceptively written "Propositions" (5 on this particular ballot) and the never-ending local bond proposals because the state budget is so in-the-hole that this is the only way towns can stay afloat.

I read somewhere a few years ago that the sheer size of our General Elections Ballot is one of the primary reasons for the uptick in Early Ballot requests. There's no way you're going to remember all that going at it cold in the voting booth! And this I do not know for a fact---it is pure speculation on my part---but I suspect that anyone who is mailing their ballot back within 48 hours is just marking the partisan part of it and maybe a couple of propositions they've heard about and to hell with the rest of it.

Finally, former9thward, I do agree with the first part of your post inasmuch as "you go where you can get the most votes" in a senate race. That only proves my point even more that this stunt occurring tomorrow has nothing whatsoever to do with McSally. The majority of Rethuglican CD 5 voters are already a lock. There is no expanding the Rethuglican base in this district nor any need to nudge them to the polls. They were always going to vote for both Biggs and McSally whether tRump showed his face in their district or not.

Where tRump needed to go to in Arizona was one of any of several other districts having a sizable non-LDS Rethuglican base where half of them are so disheartened that they're either looking to just sit this one out or actually flip their party vote. Oh well, too bad, so sad for tRump. He got played bigly by Biggs!