On Saturday, I drove to the county voter registrar's office and dropped off Vote by Mail ballots for myself and my mother. That's two more votes for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, in the bank so to speak.
And although we vote in California where we don't have to worry about Donald Trump's mafia squad trying to intimidate anyone a shade darker than Sarah Palin with a tan, people are turning out in huge numbers everywhere. Donald Trump's first of many targets, the Latino vote, is coming out in droves, so much so that the one and only John Ralston has predicted a "blue wave" in Nevada.
In the mean time, North Carolina ended early voting with record turnout, despite a Republican concentrated effort to limit early voting to make it harder for people of color and Democrats to vote. A rising number of black voters over the weekend in that state is expected to bolster what polling in the state already see as a Clinton advantage.
North Carolina and Nevada also joins Florida and Georgia (yes, Georgia!) in swelling the ranks of Latino voters - especially those voters who have never voted before. A quarter of the Latino early vote in Florida is coming from voters who have never voted before. It's an understatement to say that the Hispanic vote is literally exploding, not just in response to Donald Trump's Klan-style racism but in broad enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton.
Some will correctly point out that while the Latino (and Asian, albeit to a lesser degree) early vote is going through the roof (and my impression is that the African American vote, despite the media's memes will hold up), the white early vote is up too, padding Trump's support.
It is, however, unlikely that the numbers are a wash. The first reason is the white vote, though more intensely Republican now than ever (however, notably, the white vote is far less intense for the Republicans than POC vote is for Democrats), are a shrinking share of the electorate.
Perhaps more importantly, white voters have always had higher turnout. Well, almost always. It wasn't until 2008 until the Black turnout began to outperform the white turnout. That matters because since white voters are more likely to vote anyway, the early vote run up among the white vote probably means the cannibalization of that vote on election day. The Latino vote is starkly different in this regard, as huge swaths of the Latino early vote is either first time or sporadic voters.
Compound the factor that while Trump's rallies are filled with large ivory crowds chanting "Lock her up!", Donald Trump might actually be underperforming with key sub-segments of the white vote. Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 10 points among whites with a college degree, and married white women are not playing by their husbands' Trumpcards.
For some time, I have believed that since the start of the Obama era, America has lived in an era of demographics elections.
It's an often repeated though throwaway line in the media that George H. W. Bush won nearly 60% of the white vote and that led to him winning 426 electoral votes in 1988. Mitt Romney won 60% of the white vote and lost the electoral college in a landslide to President Obama.
But it's not just a throwaway punchline. It's real. Republicans are struggling to get out from under a massive racist base of their own building (that, by the way, they have been building for 40 years), while the Democratic party's big tent, welcoming, civil and equal rights platform is finally paying off.
These are likely the reasons that the final pre-election polls are showing Hillary Clinton's lead opening back up if only slightly, and the electoral map nearly out of reach for Donald Trump. The election is never over until the last votes are cast, and Hillary Clinton's campaign is keeping their head down and concentrating on getting out our votes tomorrow.
And when they do, we will have proven that the coalition that rose with Barack Obama is not going away with the end of his term in office. We care about our country deeply, and we will come out, stand in line, vote, and make sure that what we have built in the last eight years flourishes in the next eight. We are Hillary Clinton's firewall. We are America's firewall.
The coalition that elected the first African American president twice is not going away. That coalition of people of color, women, and young people are not just the margins anymore. We are the majority, and we are ready to claim the future of our country. We are the future. The future is here, and the future is Hillary Clinton's firewall.
I'm with her. Proudly.