Beautiful. But who are you voting for?
Photo: Jonathan Drake/REUTERS

“Oh god no, why are you calling me about this!?” said John Anzelone, a pollster for Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates. “Are you trying to upset me?”

Anzelone had just gotten off the phone with one of his clients, a member of Congress running for re-election who was asking the same thing I was asking: what’s going on with the early voting numbers, and are they as disastrous for Democrats like some others? claim concerned partisans? His response: “Stop. Just stop. Don’t go down the rabbit hole. It doesn’t mean anything. Never even look at it. Any email that comes in with updated numbers I delete before I open it.”

This question — what the early voting numbers tell us — has consumed endless hours of cable news programs and miles of overwrought social media posts since some of the battleground states began early voting last week. Now that Election Day has turned into Election Fortnight, the fear and base anxiety that used to be reserved for the first Tuesday afternoon in November now lingers for weeks.

Most smart political analysts agree with Anzelone: ​​Early voting numbers tell you next to nothing about who will win. After all, votes count the same whether they arrive on November 5 or earlier. For several cycles now, analysts have used early voting numbers to show that a shocking and unforeseen outcome in a particular state is imminent, but that the balloon will pop on Election Day as more voters come forward and long-standing party political positions are reasserting themselves.

Still, that hasn’t stopped political operatives from both sides — but especially the Republican Party — from insisting that the numbers are good for them and disastrous for the other side. And Republicans have some reasons to feel good. In Nevada, for example, 24,000 more registered Republicans voted than Democrats on Friday, in a state where Democratic strength in the powerful culinary unions would give them an edge — and where in recent elections Democrats have taken the lead in early voting. In Arizona, Republicans outperform Democrats by 42%-36% in early voting — another reversal of expectations and trends. In North Carolina, the Republican Party has a razor-thin lead, where conventional wisdom would have given Democrats a meaningful lead. And even in Pennsylvania, where Democrats have a double-digit advantage in returned ballots, Republicans have still made huge gains over their 2022 and 2020 early election performance. (Michigan and Wisconsin don’t offer party registration breakdowns for early voting, but there’s a vaguer equivalency going on in those states that analyze county data.)

Democrats, meanwhile, are offering different forms of the message cold. A memo was recently circulated at Harris headquarters making the case for how little early voting matters to the final outcome. It is the Harris campaign’s position that by instructing their base to vote early this election, Republicans are simply pushing the votes forward by days or weeks without meaningfully increasing the party’s final total. And while the early voting data may reveal party registration, it does not reveal how anyone actually voted. The game plans for both campaigns depend on a significant number of registered voters in one party voting for theirs. And while early voting is thought to be indicative of grassroots enthusiasm, as one Republican official put it, regardless of what the early voting numbers show, there is little doubt that Democrats will vote against Donald Trump.

“Since Trump has been on the ballot, the one thing Democrats have lacked is enthusiasm, so whether they vote now or vote on Election Day, it doesn’t really matter,” the operative said. “They will definitely vote.”

Returned Republican ballots in Pennsylvania are largely from voters who cast ballots in 2020, a sign that early voting is not so much bringing new voters to the polls as cannibalizing the Election Day vote. This would be a particularly good sign for Democrats, as Trump’s theory of victory relies on first-time voters with little incentive to go to the polls, said Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a democratic data company.

“If I’m Trump, I’m a little more concerned than the Harris campaign, because the Trump campaign had to change the composition of the electorate to find an advantage that wasn’t there four years ago,” he said. “They need to mobilize young people and people who don’t vote regularly – and there’s no evidence of that happening.”

A big reason for the strong Republican showing so far is that Donald Trump, after discrediting early voting in 2020 in person and by mail, has sent at least some new messages on the subject. “Swamp the vote” signs hang above his rallies, and Trump told podcaster Don Bongino last week that “I tell everyone to vote early” (although he also called early voting “stupid stuff” and suggested that voting by mail is full of fraud). The rest of the party and the SuperPAC that poured money into Trump’s reelection, however, were less conflicted, bombarding core Republican voters with mailers and digital outreach urging them to show up to the polls in such numbers that the elections of 2024 will be “too big to manipulate”. ”

The danger of comparing this year’s early elections to previous election cycles, however, is that widespread early voting is so new that it is almost impossible to draw lessons from one year to the next. The midterm electorate, whether it votes early or not, is older, whiter, and wealthier than the presidential electorate. 2020 was the Covid year – for Democrats, voting by mail became a public signal that they were taking the pandemic seriously, while for Republicans, waiting until Election Day – at Trump’s insistence – was a symbolic rejection of lockdown and social distancing. But before that election, early voting and vote-by-mail were largely Republicans’ origins.
Michael P. McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who tracks early voting, agrees that the first days of early voting, when what he calls “the super voters” come to cast their ballots, are not particularly indicative are for the final outcome. But as we get closer to Election Day, he says, early voting is starting to predict the final outcome better than polls. In 2016 and 2020, while Democrats were winning North Carolina at the polls, McDonald’s analysis of early vote totals told him (correctly) that the polls were wrong. Analyzing voting data, he said, is similar to the way pollsters model the electorate when they compile their surveys, looking at past voting patterns and making adjustments based on the demographics of early vote totals and accounting for changes in the voting laws of the states. “It’s all information you want to process, and in many cases it’s more of a true signal than what most polls tell you.”

McDonald said he would have to wait until early voting ends the weekend before Election Day to get a clearer picture of where the race stands, but for now it has been “a good early voting period for Republicans.” , citing North Carolina and Florida in particular. “That doesn’t mean Trump is going to win – but they are doing better than they were at the beginning of the early voting period. If the trajectory stays on track, we will have another very close election.”

Sophisticated campaigns use early voting data to figure out which of their reliable voters haven’t shown up yet. Democrats have a “contactability score” of 0-100 for each battleground voter, and until their target voters mail in their ballots, the Harris campaign will bombard them with micro-targeted digital ads, mailers, and door knockers until they do. On the Republican side, the field operation has largely been turned over to two SuperPACs, one led by Elon Musk and the other by conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. It’s an unusual arrangement, but Republicans involved in the effort say the strong early voting numbers show critics were wrong to doubt it. “We hit all our numbers and exceeded all our goals on door knocks and mail,” one Republican official said. “It’s still early and we still have a long way to go, but the story so far is that Republicans are doing better and Democrats are doing worse.”

Republicans not involved in the outside GOTV effort, however, aren’t so sure. “I can’t help but feel like Harris has a better operation than we do,” said a Republican politician from Georgia. “Just look at what they do. Harris and Walz seem more focused on reaching beyond the base, doing all these things here with Liz Cheney and whoever. It seems like they are in persuasion mode and they are smart enough to know what to do at this point.”

Meanwhile, poor Anzelone just wishes everyone would stop this. We’ll find out who won soon enough, and it won’t help to scour the early voting tallies for divine hidden meanings.

“As a mildly depressed middle-aged man, I have enough anxiety to deal with without hearing about early elections or exit polls or anything like that,” he said. “Should you be panicking about the early voting numbers? I doubt it. What I would do is put that fear on a closet shelf and go about your day. This is advice based on years of experience looking at early voting data and it turns out to mean nothing. Quote end quote.”