“Who has already gone to vote in advance? That’s the question Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker posed on stage to his supporters gathered in the small town of Dalton, north of Atlanta, last month. A timid handshake rose in the crowd.
The day before, in Dallas, Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams, campaigning to dislodge state governor Brian Kemp, had asked the same. And the activists, in a large majority, confirmed to him that they had already exercised their right to vote.
Two moments. Two pictures. A story: with the approach of the November 8 election in the United States, the Democratic electorate seems well and truly mobilized to prevent the red wave, in the color of the Republican Party, which, according to several pollsters, should sweep over the House of Representatives and the Senate, which would jeopardize Joe Biden’s political program for the next two years.
But the scenario still has its share of uncertainty for Donald Trump’s party which, after months spent raising baseless doubts about the reliability of the American electoral system, now finds itself having to campaign in a climate of suspicion. who could end up playing against him.
In Georgia, the Senate election runoff in early 2021 cost Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue the seats, seized by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. And for Jon Green, of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, it’s partly down to a lower turnout from Donald Trump supporters, stunned in previous months by populist conspiracy theories about the election, according to him. His research has just been published in the pages of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Allegations of fraud and the way they circulated after the presidential election partly explain our results on the decline in Republican voter turnout,” said Green, contacted by The duty. But it is difficult to predict whether the thing will be repeated during the midterm elections, especially in the States where this message seems to resonate less and where the candidates have distanced themselves from the ex-president. »
On Sunday, less than ten days before the election, 20.7 million voters had already exercised their right to vote. Democrats represent more than 50% of these early citizens, almost as many as in 2020. Republicans represent 39%, with the rest going to the independent camp.
In Florida, the nation’s most populous state, as of last week, 1.9 million people had turned out to vote, marking growth in early voting this year for both Democrats — +53% compared to 2018 — than among Republicans (+31%), according to government data. Republicans who find themselves, however, here as elsewhere, to navigate between the contradictory calls of their leaders.
“It’s better to vote on election day, assured Donald Trump during a political rally held in the rural town of Minden, Nevada, last October, while maintaining these accusations of fraud, in contradiction with facts. They can cheat less like that,” he added. The call to vote on election day is also trumpeted in several pivotal states, such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, by its supporters from the radical fringe of the party, who maintain a sickly fear of voting machines, including the reliability was demonstrated several times during the judicial recounts carried out after the defeat of the populist.
The “red mirage”
The strategy, if it is one, is risky, believes in an interview the jurist Michael R. Dimino, professor of law at Widener University in Pennsylvania. “The last thing Republicans want is for their supporters to be unable to vote, because they refused to do so in advance and may not be able to go to the polls on Election Day. »
But it could also end up recreating the “red mirage” on vote night that Republicans relied on to go to war against an imaginary fraud and pass laws to restrict electorate access to the ballot box. natural for Democrats in several states.
Red mirage? By being overrepresented on election day, the Republican vote tends to appear first, when the results are announced, before being qualified, sometimes in favor of the Democrats, by the counting of the advance vote – which, in several States, takes place after the closing of the polls.
This would then open the door to disputes and would come to maintain the myth of a wave of fraud, on which the ex-president and his supporters are now seeking to surf to undermine public confidence in the American democratic apparatus.
“We have to prepare for this scenario,” drops Bee Nguyen, a young Georgian MP, rising star in the Democratic Party and candidate for the post of Secretary of State of Georgia, met by The duty in the Atlanta area. The results will still be disputed on the basis of an invented fraud. »
She adds: “Our democracy is fragile. We have witnessed for the first time in the history of our country a president who refused the peaceful transfer of power, and we see that the Republicans continue to support him and impose the grip of conspiracy theories, misinformation about our democracy, which will certainly continue with the same cynicism. »
And this cynicism worries Americans who, while 75% think that their vote will be correctly counted, remain 67% concerned about the post-election protest which could lead extremists to descend into violence the day after the vote, dissatisfied of the result formulated by the polls, indicates a Reuters-IPSOS poll unveiled last week.
At the beginning of the year, a sounding launched by the University of Maryland on behalf of the washington post revealed that 34% of Americans consider violence against the government justified. This rate has been growing in the country since 1995, but has been climbing rapidly since 2015 and the arrival of Donald Trump in the political game in the country.
“It’s not violence, it’s the defense of our freedom, summarized last Saturday the young Raphael Perez, Republican who came to vote in advance in the city of Hialeah, north of Miami, a Republican stronghold in a county still Democratic, where the current campaign is heard here above all in the Spanish of the majority of people of Cuban origin or descent who live there. Yes, there has been fraud in 2020. No, Biden is not a legitimate president. And if it should happen again, people will react to defend themselves against this tyranny. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.