WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Askume) – Americans began voting in person for the first time on Friday, six weeks ahead of a presidential election that both Republican and Democratic leaders are calling the most important in generations.
The stakes are high: Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and other party leaders have called Republican nominee Donald Trump a threat to democracy, while Trump says he must win to save the country from Democratic rule.
In-person voting will take place six weeks before Election Day, Nov. 5. It marks the end of a bitterly divided campaign that has seen Harris emerge as President Joe Biden’s successor as the Democratic nominee over the past two months and Trump narrowly escape an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.The second apparent assassination attempt occurred in Pennsylvania.
Most states offer some form of in-person voting. The first in-person voting is happening in Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota, while several other states plan to hold in-person voting until mid-October.
While Trump has often expressed skepticism about early voting in the past, the Republican National Committee has embraced the concept this year as a key way to collect early votes as weather and other factors impact turnout in the Nov. 5 election.
Democrats have taken advantage of early voting options in recent elections and gained millions of votes in the process.
Among the 24 states that provide party data, Democrats received 41% of the early vote in 2018 , while Republicans got 35.1%, according to the American Elections Project at the University of Florida.
In 2022, the gap widened even further, with Democrats having 42.5% of the early votes and Republicans having 33.8%.
