A lot has happened in the past two months. Donald Trump survived a bullet to the head by a would-be assassin; Joe Biden failed to survive a presidential debate. Kamala Harris has been the Democrats’ replacement candidate for such a short period of time that media are still talking about a Harris “honeymoon” — and she just got around to releasing a policy platform this week.
And yet, the first ballots are already in the mail and on their way to voters. Alabama, the first state to drop ballots in the mail, started shipping them out on Wednesday to absentee ballot applicants as well as military and overseas voters.
There are 55 days between Wednesday, the official start of election season, and Nov. 5, the date that still bears the moniker of Election Day. When ballots went out in Alabama Wednesday morning, only 52 days had passed since Biden got booted out of the race.
The length of time from the launch of Harris’ campaign to the first ballots being mailed was one-tenth the number of days Biden spent on vacation during his presidency.
A baby conceived on the day Harris launched her campaign could be legally aborted today in 32 states and the District of Columbia.
When the astronauts currently stranded in space left for the International Space Station, not only was Biden still Democrats’ nominee, but his career-ending debate against Trump hadn’t even happened yet.
When ballots went out Wednesday, the first Trump-Harris presidential debate, and likely the only one we’ll get, had just taken place the night before. As recently as 2020 — the first election that, under the pretext of Covid precautions, saw our voting system transformed into a messy, months-long process — presidential debates were still taking place the week before Halloween. When Trump and Biden met for that debate, more than 42 million Americans had already voted.
After Tuesday’s debate, one voter told ABC News he “still do[es]n’t know who she [Harris] is other than not Donald Trump.” In a New York Times-Siena poll conducted last week, 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to “learn more” about her. That might have something to do with the fact that Harris hid from reporters for more than a month after she assumed her candidacy, finally sitting down with a friendly network (and with her bumbling sidekick at her side) on Aug. 29. But it also reflects the fact that she just hasn’t been in the race for very long.
The first mail ballots were actually scheduled to go out before this week’s debate. North Carolina was slated to mail ballots out last week but had to reprint them after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. won a battle with the state election board to withdraw from the ballot.
In battleground Wisconsin, clerks can mail absentee ballots as soon as they get them, and are required to send them out to voters with “an active request already on file” by Sept. 19. Ballots will go out to military and overseas voters from every state by Sept. 21, the 45-day mark before Election Day. Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia likewise “begin mailing ballots to voters” before Sept. 21, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
As the first of that wave of ballots started to go out in the mail this week, Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy had yet to hit its halfway mark.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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