Word: voting
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Presidential campaigns have long followed the same familiar calendar: a primary season, followed by party conventions, debates between the major-party candidates, a four-day intensive get-out-the-vote push that usually starts around Halloween and finally - after voters have sifted through ads and arguments or perhaps flipped a coin - Election Day. But in recent years the availability of early voting, whether by mail or in person (with some polling places open on weekends), has increased as voters have demanded a convenient alternative to waiting in long lines on the first Tuesday of November...
Because Election Day is not a national holiday, most Americans-with the exception of unionized workers like the Teamsters who have long negotiated to get the day off-have to rely on the indulgence of their employers or wait sometimes for hours in the evening in order to vote. A decade ago, only a handful of states offered early-voting options. Nationwide, 15% of the electorate cast early ballots in the 2000 presidential election. By 2004, 20% did so, and in the 2006 congressional elections, nearly one-quarter of all votes came from early voters...
...state level, the percentages are even higher. Early voting accounted for almost 30% of Montana ballots in 2006 and 34% of votes in the state's primary this June. In Colorado, county clerks estimate that almost half of active voters in this year's general election will vote before Election Day; in some particularly competitive counties, as many as 60% are expected to vote at early-voting centers...
...addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting...
...shift can also affect how a campaign chooses to devote its resources and time on the trail. During the Democratic primaries, some of Hillary Clinton's senior advisers made a case for downplaying or even skipping Iowa, based on the argument that early voting would limit the importance of winning that state. "Iowans will not be the first to vote," Clinton's deputy campaign manager Mike Henry wrote in a memo...