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    • The election showed changes in Trump’s appeal, early voting in Vanderburgh County
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    The election showed changes in Trump’s appeal, early voting in Vanderburgh County

    Online Niel Posted on

    EVANSVILLE — Donald Trump’s comeback story can be seen in Vanderburgh County as Republican voters embrace his candidacy, thousands of whom rejected him in 2020.

    It showed in the 13 percent margin Trump posted over Democrat Kamala Harris locally, an increase from his 10 percent margin of victory against Joe Biden in 2020 — and helped him break through. local Democrats’ hopes of capturing Vanderburgh County for Harris.

    In 2020, Trump has consistently been several percentage points behind other Republican candidates in contested races in Vanderburgh County. His 54 percent of the vote was eclipsed by Gov. Eric Holcomb’s 60 percent, County Recorder Debbie Stucki’s 61 percent and the 58 percent of votes posted by 8th District Congressman Larry Bucshon and then-County Clerk Carla Hayden.

    In raw numbers, Holcomb won 4,646 more votes than Trump. Stucki got 4,522 more votes than the former and future president.

    This time, Trump actually edged GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun in Vanderburgh County by one percentage point, 56 to 55. It amounted to nearly 800 votes. Trump narrowly edged Coroner candidate Bryan Underwood and matched the 56% posted by Republican US Senate candidate Jim Banks. There was no US Senate race in Indiana in 2020.

    Where Trump lagged behind other Republican candidates, it wasn’t by much. His 56 percent was eclipsed by Attorney General Todd Rokita’s 57 percent, and the 58 percent posted by County Commissioner nominee Amy Canterbury and District 8 nominee Mark Messmer.

    Dottie Thomas, vice chair of the Vanderburgh County GOP, organized much of the door-to-door campaigning carried out by local Republican candidates and coordinated other outreach efforts.

    “I’ve actually seen more enthusiasm (for Trump),” said Thomas, who was elected Vanderburgh County Clerk unopposed on Tuesday. “We were able to get more Republican voters to vote this time through phone calls, door knocking.”

    Local Republicans have actively targeted GOP voters who voted in 2016 but not in 2020, Thomas said.

    That, and the current national political climate, have proven highly exciting for Trump in particular, Thomas said.

    “Certainly,” she said.

    All Republican candidates in contested races were bested by former Evansville Mayor Russ Lloyd Jr., who won 60 percent of the vote to be elected the next Vanderburgh County Recorder.

    Turnout is down in more ways than one, too

    The 2020 figures – 78,718 votes were cast, just a few hundred short of the 2008 record of 79,193 – have given rise to speculation among the local political class that this year will set a new record.

    lines – long queues leaving the polling stations before and on election day — added to the impression of frantic voting.

    But the unofficial total of votes cast – 74,494 – was several thousand votes short of a record. That was about 250 more than the number of votes cast in 2016 and about 1,000 more than the total in 2012. This year’s number could still rise gradually as military and overseas votes trickle into the deadline for 10 days.

    County Clerk Marsha Abell Barnhart wondered if the consistently long lines outside the smaller polling stations created the illusion of a record vote.

    “We still had some large churches for Election Day, but for early voting, like early voting in the North Park Library, it doesn’t have the space that the Central Library has,” Barnhart said Wednesday. “We could put 20 cars in Central Library so the lines would move pretty quickly, but you couldn’t put that many in North Park because it’s not that big.”

    Barnhart acknowledged that the lines were sometimes long outside the larger polling stations. Like Monday, when the line from the Central Library wound halfway through the parking lot. Hundreds of people waited two hours or more to vote early that day.

    All but a few thousand of the nearly 74,500 people who voted chose to do so in person, early or on Election Day. That’s still a big number.

    “If we had a bigger area where we could move more people faster, you wouldn’t see those big lines,” Barnhart said.

    There was one other way this year’s turnout failed to match or surpass 2020.

    The total number of voters in the county skyrocketed from 115,553 in 2018 to 131,012 for the 2020 general election, a wild affair marked by a polarized presidential race and a record number of early in-person votes and absentee ballots by mail due to concerns related to COVID-19.

    The 78,718 votes cast that year in Vanderburgh County represented 60 percent of all registered voters. But the county’s voter list saw a further increase between 2020 and 2024, when it reached 134,388.

    This year’s unofficial total of 74,494 votes cast is not only a lower number than the 2020 total, but was among a larger number of potential voters. In the end, there were 55 percent of registered voters — still a big number, but not the 60 percent who voted four years ago.

    The early vote changed as follows

    The look of early voting in this Vanderburgh County election was fundamentally different from 2020, a year that saw record numbers of in-person early voting and absentee ballots by mail.

    Exactly 40,129 voters voted early in person in 2020, and election officials estimate about the same number did so this year.

    But in 2020, pandemic concerns have grown all early voting – mail-in absentee ballots, in-person voting, travel board and military/overseas – at 56,420, according to county voting data. That left 22,298 people to vote on Election Day.

    This year, unofficial figures show that 44,993 early votes of all types were cast, including about 40,000 in person. Election Day voting totaled 29,909, an increase of nearly 8,000 over the 2020 tally.

    Dates are imprecise and subject to change as military and overseas ballots arrive and contested ballots are adjudicated by the Vanderburgh County Board of Elections at its post-election meeting.

    That meeting, at which the final tallies will be settled, is set for Nov. 15 in the Election Committee office in Room 216 of the Civic Center.

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