A handful of absentee ballots decided Starkville’s 2017 mayoral contest, and Marty Wiseman believes absentee and mail-in ballots will decide the 2020 presidential election as well.
As a result, Election Day will be more like Election Month, the retired Mississippi State University political science professor told Starkville Rotary Club at its Monday meeting.
“You can go on to bed on election night because it will be days before you know the results, and there are lots of shenanigans that will happen in between,” he said.
Wiseman was director for the university’s John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Economic Development for more than two decades. His son, Parker, was Starkville’s mayor for eight years.
The race for Parker’s successor was “challenged, as it should be,” Wiseman said, when Lynn Spruill eked out what ultimately was a 5-vote lead over Johnny Moore. The challenge in the Mississippi Supreme Court finalized Spruill’s victory.
Absentee and affidavit ballots come in late and have to be verified in order to be counted, and a few affidavits were thrown out during the mayoral election.
As many as 80 million mail-in ballots could be cast in the presidential election, in which voting is now well underway in several states, and about 70 percent of mail-in ballots are expected to be from Democratic voters, Wiseman said. There is a possibility that Republican President Donald Trump will be considered victorious on Nov. 3 only for Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden to take the lead in the following days, he said.
“Trump might declare victory in states he was leading in only to have a high percentage of ballots that took up to 10 days, as the law allows in some states, to finish counting,” Wiseman said.
Trump has continually spoken against mail-in voting. The U.S. Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, which decided the 2000 presidential election in George W. Bush’s favor, showed that “there are many ways to get rid of a mail-in ballot,” Wiseman said, and each state has its own laws for casting and processing mail-in and absentee ballots.
Two demographic factors that election experts will watch closely this year, Wiseman said, are the divides between rural and urban voters and between college-educated and non college-educated voters. In 2016, rural and non college-educated voters overwhelmingly supported Trump while the opposite groups supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The only major metropolitan areas that Trump won in 2016 were Fort Worth, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona.
Clinton won far fewer counties nationwide than Trump did, but those counties produce 65 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a factor in both the education and geographic divides, Wiseman said.
Voter registration demographic data indicates shifts in potential voters for both parties, he said.
“There’s been a huge uptick in Republican registration of non college-educated white males, which is starting to send a chill up the spine of the Biden folks,” he said. “By contrast, there’s been an erosion of the suburban college-educated female vote.”
Mail-in ballots will not have to decide the election if Biden has “an insurmountable lead” on Election Night, but Wiseman said that does not appear likely.
Prompted by a question from an audience member, Wiseman also offered his thoughts on Mississippi’s U.S. Senate contest between incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican appointed and then elected to serve the remainder of the late Sen. Thad Cochran’s term, and her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy, a former Congressman and the first Black U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
Wiseman said he anticipates Espy garnering more than 45 percent of the vote but having trouble overcoming the “blue ceiling,” in which a Mississippi Democrat comes close to 50 percent but does not quite get there. He said Espy would have to receive a great deal of support in the Delta, where he represented Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 1993.
Biden’s choice of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) as his running mate, the first Black woman on a major-party ticket, might do Espy a favor, Wiseman said.
“The combination of Espy and Harris may be enough to pull some votes that might have stayed home or not paid attention otherwise,” he said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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