Reply #38: Rawl won absentees...

[David in Canada]

Rawl won among absentee voters. There are likely two reasons for this:

1) Voting absentee requires going out of ones way to an early voting station or filling out a form to receive an absentee ballot via mail. Both of these take time. A low-information voter is unlikely to go to the trouble unless it is a general election and/or a race that has a lot of MSM attention.

2) Those who vote by mail can actually go online and Google candidates in races they are unsure of. If both absentees and election day voters vote due to a few top, higher profile races, there would be less discrepancy in high profile races and more in low-key ones. In all the online newspaper articles I read before the SC primary, Greene was never mentioned other than the post-filing deadline list of qualified candidates and most stories mentioned Rawl in passing as the "likely nominee". Those who voted in person on election day couldn't step outside the booth for a moment and search Google to find out who Rawl and/or Greene were. Those with mail-in ballots could.