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This article was updated on Nov. 7 to include preliminary election results from Truro.
PROVINCETOWN — An anxiety-provoking presidential election contest came to an anxious end on the Outer Cape on Tuesday night, as Democrats and Republicans watched election returns. Preliminary tallies showed that little has changed in the Outer Cape towns since the 2020 contest between then-President Trump and Joe Biden.
The editor of the Independent noted in his Jan. 14 editorial page column “that 2,144 citizens of Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown voted for Trump on Nov. 3.” He didn’t go on to analyze how big a share of local voters that raw number represented, how the proportion of voters who preferred the incumbent to Democrat Joe Biden varied among the four towns of the Outer Cape, or how these local shares compared to those elsewhere on the Cape and across Massachusetts.
An analysis of those numbers reveals a fascinating pattern: looking only at the 12 Cape Cod towns along Route 6, the Cape’s backbone, the farther from the Cape Cod Canal you go, the lower the percentage of Trump voters.
As one can see on the accompanying map, Trump’s vote shares were far from uniform across the Outer Cape. As Route 6 winds from Provincetown, through Truro and Wellfleet, to Eastham, the percentage of Trump voters steadily rises: from 7.0 percent at the beginning, to 19.3 and 19.9 percent in the middle, and finally to 28.2 percent at the end.
What was more surprising was that, as Route 6 continues through eight more towns on its way to the Sagamore Bridge, the percentage of Trump voters continues to increase steadily from town to town without a single exception: Orleans, 30.5 percent; Brewster, 31.6 percent; Harwich, 36.1 percent; Dennis, 38.3 percent; Yarmouth, 39.1 percent; Barnstable, 40.2 percent; Sandwich, 43.3 percent; and Bourne, 44.8 percent.
Three Cape Cod towns are not crossed by Route 6: Chatham, 36.8 percent; Mashpee, 40.1 percent; and Falmouth, 33.9 percent.
When compared to the rest of the state’s cities and towns, it turns out that those on the Cape gave Trump very similar shares of their votes. The median vote share for Trump among the Cape’s 15 towns was Chatham’s, 36.8 percent, while his median vote share among all of the state’s cities and towns was almost identical: North Andover’s 36.6 percent. (When a set of numbers is listed from smallest to largest, the median is the one in the middle; in this case, Chatham ranked eighth among the Cape’s 15 towns, while North Andover ranked 176th among the state’s 351 municipalities.)
Returning to our four Outer Cape communities: Provincetown’s share of Trump voters was not only the lowest on the Cape, it was the second lowest in the entire state. (Provincetown’s 7.0 percent was just above Cambridge’s 6.6 percent.) Truro and Wellfleet were among only 38 Massachusetts cities and towns (less than 11 percent of the total) where Trump got fewer than one-fifth of the votes. And even though Eastham’s percentage of Trump voters was four times that of Provincetown’s, it was still lower than those of 254 other Massachusetts municipalities.
What lies behind the variation in support for Trump among the Cape’s towns, and its remarkably consistent gradient? Discuss among yourselves. [Readers are invited to send their theories on this question for publication in next week’s edition. —Editor]
Note: All statistics in this article are from a sortable table on WBUR’s website that provides election results for every city and town in the state.
Jim Campen of Wellfleet and Cambridge worked with the Movement Voter Project to support grassroots organizing that was crucial in keeping Trump’s vote shares below those of Biden in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris swept the Outer Cape in Tuesday’s presidential election, defeating Donald Trump and Mike Pence by margins ranging from 42 percent in Eastham to 85 percent in Provincetown.
In the four Outer Cape towns, the preliminary vote totals as of early Wednesday were 8,512 for Biden and Harris and 2,144 for Trump and Pence.
In the race for two county commissioner seats, Democrats Sheila Lyons and Mark Forest easily outpolled Republican Ronald Beaty and independent Abraham Kasparian in all four towns.
PROVINCETOWN — The Outer Cape likes to vote. Turnout in the 2016 presidential election ranged from 81 percent in Provincetown to a staggering 87 percent in Eastham. This year, early in-person and mail-in voting may help push the Outer Cape’s numbers even higher.
With another week of early voting still to go, all four towns had already surpassed 2016’s early vote totals.
As of Monday, more than 2,610 mail-in ballots had been returned in Eastham, representing 57 percent of all registered voters there, according to Town Clerk Cindy Nicholson. That’s more than 70 percent of 2016’s total turnout. Another 541 people voted early in person in the first week of early voting. Together, that means 85 percent of 2016’s total voter turnout in Eastham had already voted eight days before Election Day.
Eastham leads the pack in voting — but in each of the other three towns, votes received as of Monday, Oct. 26, were well ahead of 2016’s early vote, and were more than half of 2016’s total vote. Those are high numbers, considering that there were five more days of early voting, 11 more days of mail-in ballots arriving, and Election Day itself still to come.
These numbers mean the Outer Cape votes at rates similar to the most organized and politically engaged counties in the country — places like Dane County, Wisc., where campaigns spend millions of dollars, and turnout was 82 percent in 2016.
Most of the Outer Cape votes have come in through the mail rather than at early voting sites. In 2016, early voting was new, and mail-in voting was barely used. Only Truro and Wellfleet reported their absentee vote totals in 2016, and they were only about 10 percent of all ballots cast.
This year, the pandemic and the need to remain socially distant brought a nationwide move toward mail-in voting. Massachusetts sent vote-by-mail applications to every registered voter in the state in July, and again in September.
Mail-in ballots can be postmarked as late as Election Day and still be counted, as long as they arrive by Friday, Nov. 6. As Election Day approaches, however, officials are telling voters to consider hand-delivering mail-in ballots to an official town drop box, or to an early voting site. Hand-delivering ballots in the days before Election Day means a postal slowdown can’t interfere with your vote.
Voters who mailed their ballots can check to see that they have been received and accepted at TrackMyBallotMA.com. Mail-in ballots can sometimes be rejected, either because the signature on the outer envelope doesn’t match the one in the voter file, or because the inner “secrecy envelope” that separates the voter’s name from the secret ballot choices is missing.
If your ballot has been rejected, you will either be mailed a new ballot, or if it’s too close to election day, you may need to go vote in person instead. Check your ballot status online and contact your town clerk if your ballot has been rejected.
If the presidential election is close nationwide, then rejected ballots and signature matching could become the next national trauma. Voting by mail tends to increase turnout wherever it exists, but it also has a higher rejection rate than in-person voting. Litigation over signature matching is already underway in Pennsylvania and other states.
Not just the Outer Cape but the whole nation appears to be on track for record-breaking turnout this year. According to a Pew Research survey, voter engagement is the highest it has been in at least 20 years. Many are hoping that record-breaking turnout produces a clear and obvious winner as well.
Four years ago, 2,282 citizens of the four Outer Cape towns voted for Donald Trump: 208 in Provincetown, 361 in Truro, 515 in Wellfleet, and 1,198 in Eastham. (Hillary Clinton won 6,926 votes here in 2016.)
As the 2020 presidential election commences, this much is certain: Massachusetts will go blue. Clinton trounced Trump, with 60.8 percent of the state’s votes to Trump’s 33.5 percent, in 2016, and all indications are that Joe Biden will do even better on Nov. 3.
