By james art 
More than half of the 2020 votes are already in the bank…
Early voting continued its unprecedented surge in South Carolina as the election day voting window neared its closing point. By Friday (November 1, 2024) – the penultimate day of early voting in the Palmetto State – more than 1.3 million registered voters have already saved their ballots, according to data from SCVotes.gov. That total included a record 134,642 voters who voted on Friday.
All said, 39.5 percent of the state 3.42 million-a strong electorate has already voted. Meanwhile, early voting totals so far have remained flat 53.3 percent of voter turnout from the 2020 presidential election when 2.53 million South Carolinians voted.
The final numbers will be announced by the CC Electoral Commission after the total results of the votes are drawn up today.
Courtesy of our intrepid Director of Research Jen Woodhere’s a look at the data and how it compares to the numbers seen during the 2024 presidential primaries in February — and the partisan primaries in June.
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Apparently, South Carolina’s nine electoral votes are already in the bag for the former US president Donald Trump.
The Republican nominee – who won 55 percent of the vote en route to victories in 2016 and 2020 — is a lock to prevail in the Palmetto State. In fact, no Democrat has governed South Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976 – series Kamala Harris it won’t break.
Where are all those early ballots? Jen has you covered there too…
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On a national scale, more than 73.3 million early votes were cast statewide as of 3:34 p.m. EDT Saturday, according to data from the University of Florida Elective laboratory. In states where voters register by party, 36.5 million votes were cast – 38.2 percent of them from the Democrats, 36 percent by the Republicans and 25.8 percent from those not affiliated with any party.
That’s a huge jump in early voting for the GOP … though its impact on the upcoming presidential race remains unclear. With Election Day less than 72 hours away, stay tuned to FITSNews as we anticipate the culmination of what has been the wildest political campaign in years…
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THE NUMBERS…
(IC Election Commission)
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you’re reading right now. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as Press Secretary to the Governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven children.
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