The chairs of Ohio’s two major political parties are carefully watching the numbers of people turning out to vote early in person and returning absentee ballots.
Democratic Party chair David Pepper says more people likely to vote Democratic have been voting in person or returning their absentee ballots, and he expects the first weekend of early voting coming up to be good. “It seems like it’s pretty steady from ‘12, and ‘12 was a winning year for us. So if we simply repeat ’12, we feel good about it.”
But Republican Party chair Matt Borges says Republicans won election day in 2012, and he thinks a difficult group of GOP voters are turning out now. “We’re seeing more turnout among our lower propensity voters in the early voting period than the Democrats are.”
Borges and Pepper do agree that absentee ballots are down because of the elimination of the Golden Week of early voting.
