Early voting puts Iowa back in the spotlight
This article originally appeared on RealClearPolitics.
It certainly won't match the level of national attention garnered before the first-in-the-nation caucuses last January, but Iowa is about to reprise its status as an early barometer of the presidential race.
On Thursday, Iowa will become the first swing state to begin early voting. Once it has been gradually rolled out nationwide, early voting is expected to be even more consequential than was the case four years ago -- perhaps all but foretelling the winner of the presidential race before Election Day comes around on Nov. 6.
For months, staffers and volunteers at the Obama campaign's more than five dozen Iowa field office have worked relentlessly to encourage Democrats to request absentee ballots, which any registered voter in the state is allowed to fill out and submit before the polls open officially in six weeks.
As of Monday, registered Democrats had requested 109,709 such ballots in Iowa, while Republicans there had requested less than one-fifth of that total (20,458).
Iowa Democrats are pleased with their efforts thus far.
"Many people on the Obama campaign staff never left after '07," said Michael Hunt, communications director of the state's Democratic Party, which is working in conjunction with the Obama campaign on the early voting effort. "So we've been extremely fortunate to have an institutional memory in Iowa that goes back to the days when he was Sen. Obama."
In contrast, interviews with several Iowa Republicans revealed a commonly held acceptance that Mitt Romney has fallen behind the president in the state, but also a shared belief that the Democrats' big lead in early voting was to be expected and is not any reason for panic.
"My sense is that Romney is down right now -- maybe five or six points -- but the early voting has always been a strong Democrat process," said longtime Iowa GOP fundraiser and activist Becky Beach. "It doesn't worry me that they have an advantage, as we made some real gains in voter registration this year."
With just 14 Iowa field offices, the Romney campaign and aligned Republican committees have only a fraction of the staff on the ground that their Democratic opponents have at their disposal.
With that deficit in mind, the Romney camp has waited until ballots actually become available to make its early voting push, declining to try to match the Obama campaign's efforts over the summer.
The first of about 10 scheduled mailings with information on how to request early ballots will arrive in the mailboxes of Iowa Republicans by the end of this week, at which time the Romney campaign expects a significant uptick in its early voting activity.
Romney partisans in the state know that they likely will never match the opposition's initiative in terms of volume, but they don't believe that is necessary, since Iowa Republicans have traditionally preferred to hold off on casting their ballots until Election Day.
"It's the ritual of voting on Election Day," one Iowa Republican strategist said. "A lot of our people just like to vote at the polls."
Despite the pervasiveness of that attitude, the state GOP has made inroads trying to change it. Under the guidance of then-Chairman Matt Strawn, the Iowa Republican Party had considerable success during the 2010 midterm cycle with its first concerted effort to improve dramatically its early-voting performance. That came via a yearlong informational campaign directed at party activists and a successful effort to add satellite locations where voters could cast early ballots in person.
In that boom year for Republicans nationwide, more than 23 percent of registered Iowa Republicans voted early, nearly on par with the Democratic rate of 25 percent.
After the preliminary results of January's caucuses were reversed, handing Rick Santorum a nominal victory over Romney and sparking intra-state-party turmoil, the Romney campaign has taken over completely the early-voting operation from the Iowa GOP.
But Strawn expressed confidence that Romney's team is picking up on the mantra of "playing chess, as opposed to checkers" when it comes to the early-voting tradition the Iowa GOP sought to establish ahead of the midterms.
"Everything I've seen to date indicates the Romney camp is improving on what we started in 2010," Strawn said. "Two years ago, we saw the Iowa Dems jump out to a huge absentee request lead at this point, only to watch the request -- and, more importantly, the return -- gap get closer and closer to parity by the time we reached Election Day."
Though neither presidential nominee has any trips to Iowa on his current public schedule, both sides are set to dispatch key campaign surrogates to the state that has seen some of the most frequent candidate visits in the race thus far, in part to help promote early voting among their bases.
Michelle Obama will campaign in Iowa on Friday, and in an online video released Tuesday, the first lady encouraged state supporters to bring someone with them to vote early "and become one of the very first people to help move our country forward."
On the Republican side, Paul Ryan is slated to return to Iowa next week for a photo-friendly tour of cities and towns along the Mississippi River, according to a GOP source in the state.
