Oct.08

electoral-vote.com

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Early Voting Update

Last week, we had an item about Michael McDonald—the political scientist, not the musician who was reportedly a member of Steely Dan. McDonald is the nation's expert in early voting and, as reader J.P. in Glenside, PA, brings to our attention, he has commenced with updates of his page for 2024.

We'll probably check in with him once a week between now and the election. Here's a rundown of the first round of early voting figures:

• Thus far, 1,896,960 votes have been received, across 25 states. Given that blue states tend to be more friendly to early/absentee voting, the ballots have a blue skew. That said, the highest number of ballots has been cast in the purple state of Virginia, while Florida is in the top five.
  
  
• Of those 25 states, 20 register voters by party. Thus far, ballots cast by Democrats outnumber ballots cast by Republicans by a margin of more than 2-to-1 (58.4% to 25.9%). The blue lean of the responding states surely explains some of that, but not all of it. It sure looks like the Democrats' tendency to vote early at a much greater rate than Republicans is going to hold for another election. Donald Trump will be happy; the RNC, not so much.
  
  
• Just under 60% of the ballots received so far were cast by voters over 65. That's not too surprising, since that demographic votes more reliably than any other age cohort. Further, older (often incapacitated) voters tend to rely on absentee voting more than other cohorts. And there are some states where absentee voting is ONLY available to older voters (and active-duty military and overseas voters).
  
  
• Only five of the states that have reported votes so far break ballots down by gender: Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan and North Carolina. And in those states, 52.2% of the ballots were cast by women, while 44.7% were cast by men (3.1% chose not to reveal their gender). That's a gap of 7.5%, which might seem good for the Democrats (since women skew blue), but the blue team won women by 11 points in 2020 and 15 points in 2016. So, Harris is really going to need to extend her advantage here. There's every chance she can, especially since this is a pretty small sample size.

That's the news, for now. In 2020, McDonald documented 101,453,111 early votes. The 2024 numbers will surely get more interesting, and more instructive, once the voting tallies reach the tens of millions. (Z)