Nov.05

electoral-vote.com

Dem 48

   

GOP 52

One Last Look: The Early Voting

We intended to write weekly items on early voting, as soon as the window opened in various states, and Michael McDonald began updating his excellent site.

We didn't do it, however, because we ultimately realized... there's very little way to know what the early voting numbers mean. Early voting was fairly uncommon up through the second Obama election, and largely involved groups who do not particularly reflect the broader electorate (elderly, disabled, residents of a few pretty blue states, etc.). There was a pretty big uptick in early voting in 2016 (approximately 46 million early ballots cast), and then a giant uptick in 2020, thanks to the pandemic (approximately 101 million early votes cast). With an effective sample size of only two elections, and one of those an extremely unusual election, there isn't much basis for assessing what early voting numbers really tell us.

That said, now that early voting is over, and most of the numbers are in, we'll run down the most important trendlines that have presented themselves:

• Lotsa Ballots: At the moment, just shy of 80 million early votes have been reported. Undoubtedly, there are some number from Monday that have yet to be announced. So, early voting this year figures to lag a bit behind the pandemic year, but not by too much.
  
  
• Republicans are Up...: As far as we know, Donald Trump is still officially opposed to early voting. However, he seems to have largely shut his yap on that subject, while the RNC has openly encouraged early voting. On top of that, withholding early votes is clearly stupid, and can only cause Republicans to lose out on voting if something goes wrong on Election Day. For all of these reasons, Republican early voting is up as compared to 2020; they made up 30% of the early vote back then, and they are around 36% of the vote now.
  
  Whether that is meaningful is another matter. It could be that by stopping the Democrats from building a big lead before Election Day, Republicans will flip some states they lost in 2020. On the other hand, those Republican voters might not be all that Republican. A big chunk of them could be Republican women who are trying to get votes cast without their husbands seeing them. Further, it could be, and probably is, the case that Democratic early voters in 2020 were particularly concerned about COVID, and are not worrying about that now, and so don't mind going to the polls in person.
  
  The only thing we are reasonably sure of is that a "red mirage" is a little less likely this year, as the day-of ballots won't be as far out of alignment with the early ballots as was the case 4 years ago.
  
  
• ...And So Are Women: In 2020, the early-voting "gender gap" was around 8 points. This year it is 10 points (with more women than men voting in both cases). Given the salience of the abortion issue, and the fact that women skew more Democratic than men do, this likely favors Kamala Harris.
  
  
• Republicans Like What They See in Nevada: The Republicans did particularly well in Nevada in early voting, banking 50,000 more ballots than the Democrats did. Not all Republicans actually vote Republican, but if most of them do/did, then that's a tough hill for Harris to climb.
  
  
• Democrats Like What They See in Pennsylvania...: It's a small-ish data point, but potentially an important one: The number of Republican senior citizens voting in Pennsylvania is down, as compared to past elections. To be more specific, Pennsylvania seniors are roughly equally divided between the two parties, but in early voting, the Democrats are getting 58% of the senior vote as compared to 35% for the Republicans. If that trend continues, it's bad news for the GOP.
  
  Also, the gender gap in Pennsylvania is larger than the national average, checking in at 13 points (56% women voters, 43% men).
  
  
• ...And Georgia: Kamala Harris' polling in the Sun Belt isn't great, and Georgia is her weakest state of the seven swing states, but early voting is through the roof there. The Peach State might end up having more early votes than in 2020, which would make it an anomaly. And a big part of what's powering the early voting is record early turnout among Black voters. Undoubtedly, those votes will skew heavily for Harris, as more than 80% of Black Georgians are Democrats.

We could write more, but these are certainly the most notable trendlines. And again, given the lack of meaningful context, nobody really knows what it all means. (Z)