Early voters, urban voters and minority voters are all more likely to wait and wait. And that makes them less likely to vote in the future, according to new research. Minority voters are six times as likely as whites to wait longer than an hour to vote. Those disparities persist even within the same town or county, suggesting they don’t reflect simply the greater difficulty of putting on elections in populous cities.
In a battle of the belts, it’s Sun vs. Rust.
The changing nature of the presidential map can be deduced from where Mrs. Clinton went on Monday. She was assured enough of her prospects for winning Florida, a state that George W. Bush won twice, to not return to the biggest battleground of them all, but she held her second event in four days in Michigan, a state no Republican has won since 1988.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides express confidence that the results will go their way, in large part because of their optimism about Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia, but they are less bullish about their prospects in Michigan and states like Iowa and Ohio. It is a striking turnabout given how rooted Democrats once were in the heavily unionized Midwest and how much they struggled in the South and parts of the West.
But they have effectively swapped much of their working-class white base for the so-called rising demographic of millennials, nonwhite voters and suburbanites clustered near cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington.
From watching these communities, it will become clear on Tuesday why Mrs. Clinton’s party enjoys a structural advantage in the Electoral College. But this election may also hasten the day when more of the heartland becomes out of reach, illustrating what Democrats lost as much as what they gained.
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