There’s a lot of chatter about the early vote with Donald Trump changing his tune and suggesting that the GOP is breaking all early vote records. (“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it!) It does appear that the early vote is going well but it’s worth taking a look at some analysis as to what it means.
Tom Bonier is the early vote data guy and he wrote this on his substack today, discussing why this year is different:
Well, for one, we’re not in the peak of a deadly pandemic. The 2020 election saw the biggest liberalization of access to early voting as states adapted to the realities of the pandemic. And it was a great success, with over 100 million Americans safely casting their vote before Election Day. Of course, there was an asymmetry here. Democrats were more covid-conscious, and therefore more likely to cast an early vote (take Pennsylvania, where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the early vote by an almost 3 to 1 margin). And at the same time, Republicans largely abandoned voting by mail, due to Donald Trump claiming that mail voting was fraudulent.
Republicans acknowledge that their failure to drive their voters out early in 2020 put them at a strategic disadvantage, and have since committed significant resources to turning that around in this election. Just yesterday the New York Times reported “Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early.”
It is also important to keep in mind that many states have changed access to early voting. Michigan added early in person voting, while North Carolina put stricter voter ID laws in place. Georgia put additional regulations into place on mail voting.
All of these changes will make any comparisons in the current early vote to 2020 numbers extremely difficult, at best.
With Democrats shifting from early voting to Election Day, and Republicans doing the opposite, it is safe to say the expectation is that the early voting will skew much more Republican than it did in 2020. So at what point can we draw conclusions as to which side has an intensity advantage? We may not be able to, though when the results in a state defy expectations (as they currently appear to in Michigan and Wisconsin, where partisan models suggest the early vote is actually more Democratic than it was at this point in 2020), that is noteworthy.
He goes on to discuss the specifics in North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania which is very interesting. He concludes with this:
While banking votes early is obviously important, it’s also important who is voting. The early evidence is that Republicans are cannibalizing likely Election Day voters, not turning out lower propensity voters early, which is always the priority. As a matter of fact, across the battleground states, 92% of voters who have cast their ballot so far also voted in the 2020 election.
In short, it means that something that was already difficult before the massive vote-mode shifts we’re seeing happening this year will be exponentially more difficult. And in turn, we are seeing exponentially more flawed analyses, so buyer beware. As I noted earlier, my general approach this cycle is to stay in this context of expected vote-mode shifting, so when the early vote looks close to 2020 (or better) for Democrats, that is a very good sign, and when it looks worse for Democrats, like in North Carolina, we are left with the question of how much worse is problematic.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been taken in before by early vote euphoria and I’m very resistant to making too much of it one way or another. As Bonier points out, comparisons are very dicey since the rules are changing and more and more people have availability (and, I would guess, the Republicans are making it harder in some places.) This is still a new thing and we just don’t have much to go on.