Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
As Arizonans head to the polls across the state to cast their ballots, more than half of the votes that will determine the next president, who will control the state legislature and whether abortion will be a constitutional right in the Grand Canyon State have already been cast.
And after four years of falsely demonizing early voting as a vector for election fraud and a 2022 cycle that saw Republicans largely shun voting by mail, GOP voters appear to have returned to form somewhat and enter Election Day with a six-figure edge on ballots cast.
An analysis of early ballots by political analytics firm Ascend Digital shows that Republican voters have cast nearly 142,000 more ballots already than have Democrats since early voting began on Oct. 9. While turnout figures for the two parties are nearly identical at a bit more than 52%, voters this year have increasingly registered as Republicans in Arizona.
The result is that GOP voters have already cast more than 785,000 ballots compared to 643,000 for Democrats. Republican ballots account for 41% of those already cast, while Democrats amount to almost 34%. Voters who aren’t registered with a major party, most of whom are independents, make up about 25% of the ballots that have already been processed and tallied.
Older voters are driving the turnout, with more than 60% of the ballots already cast coming from voters at least 55 years old.
A key demographic for Democrats up and down the ballot is younger voters, who tend to heavily favor liberal policies and Democratic candidates. So far, their turnout lags far behind 2020, when 51% of voters aged 18-29 cast a ballot. According to Ascend Digital’s early ballot tracking, just 19% of voters 18-24 have voted early, as have 22% of voters 25-34.
With two-thirds of Gen Z voters surveyed by ASU’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy earlier this year saying they planned to vote, Democratic hopes may hinge on efforts to get younger voters to show up at a polling place on Election Day.
In this year’s election, poll after poll has shown a stark gender divide, particularly in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. While Trump’s campaign is buoyed by strong support among men, Harris has surged on the strength of her backing among women, who favor her on average by more than 10 percentage points.
Arizona women have cast about 125,000 more ballots than men, and they make up 53% of the ballots returned so far. And more than 51% of women who are registered to vote have already done so.
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