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

“Oh my God no, why are you calling me for 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 they’re as dire for Democrats as some. do anxious partisans claim? His response: “Stop. Stop it. Don’t go down the rabbit hole. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t even look at him. Every email that comes with updated numbers I delete before I even open it.”

That question — what early voting numbers tell us, if anything — has consumed endless hours of cable news and miles of excessive social media posts since some battleground states began early voting last week. As election day turned into election fifteen, the anxiety and faint dread that used to be reserved for the first Tuesday afternoon in November has continued to linger for several weeks.

Most smart political analysts agree with Anzelone – early voting numbers tell you almost nothing about who will win. After all, votes count the same whether they come on or before November 5. For several cycles, analysts have jumped on early voting numbers to show that a shocking and unexpected result in a particular state is imminent, only for that bubble to pop on Election Day as more voters turn out and partisan alignments long duration is reaffirmed.

Still, that hasn’t stopped political operatives in both parties — but especially the GOP — from insisting the numbers are good for them and devastating for the other side. And Republicans have some reason to feel good. In Nevada, for example, 24,000 more registered Republicans had voted than Democrats by Friday, in a state where Democrats’ strength in powerful food unions was seen as giving them an advantage — and where recent elections have seen Democrats conduct early voting. In Arizona, Republicans lead Democrats 42%-36% among early voters — another reversal of expectations and trends. In North Carolina, the GOP has a slim lead where conventional wisdom would have had the Democrats way ahead. And even in Pennsylvania, where Democrats hold a double-digit advantage in returned ballots, Republicans still posted massive gains over their 2022 and 2020 early voting performances. (Michigan and Wisconsin don’t provide party registration breakdowns for early voting, but there’s a murkier equivalent game in those states that look at county data.)

Democrats, meanwhile, are offering various forms of the message cold. At Harris headquarters, a memo was recently circulated that argued how little early voting matters to the bottom line. The Harris campaign’s position is that Republicans, by instructing their staff to vote early in this election, are simply pulling votes forward by days or weeks without significantly raising the party’s final tally. Additionally, while early voting data might reveal party registration, it doesn’t reveal how someone actually voted. The game plans for both campaigns are based on a significant number of registered voters, with one side voting for theirs. And while early voting is considered an indicator of grassroots enthusiasm, as one Republican operative said, no matter what the early voting numbers show, there is little doubt that Democrats are turning out to vote against Donald Trump.

“Ever since Trump was on the ballot, the one thing the Democrats haven’t 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 mostly from voters who voted in 2020, a sign that early voting isn’t bringing new voters to the polls but cannibalizing the Election Day vote. That would be a particularly good sign for Democrats because Trump’s theory of victory is based on voters who have a low propensity to turn out for the first time, according to Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm.

“If I’m Trump, I’m a little more worried than the Harris campaign because the Trump campaign had to change the makeup of the electorate to find an edge that didn’t exist four years ago,” he said. “It has to be young people and people who don’t vote regularly – and there’s no evidence that that’s going to happen.”

A big reason for the strong Republican showing so far is that Donald Trump, after disparaging in-person and mail-in early voting in 2020, has sent at least some new messages on the issue. “Swamp the vote” signs are posted above his rallies, and Trump told podcaster Don Bongino last week that “I tell everybody to vote early” (though he also called early voting “stupid stuff” and suggested mail-in voting). is full of fraud). Still, the rest of the party and the SuperPAC that poured money into Trump’s re-election campaign were less confrontational, hitting key Republican voters with emails and digital outreach urging them to turn out in such large numbers. that the 2024 election is becoming “too big to handle. “

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

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

Sophisticated campaigns use early voting data to learn which of their trusted voters haven’t turned up yet. Democrats have a “contactability score” of 0-100 for each battleground state voter, and until their targeted voters send in ballots, the Harris campaign will bombard them with micro-targeted digital ads, mailers and door knocks door 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 vote totals show critics were wrong to doubt them. “We met all of our benchmarks and exceeded all of our goals in terms of door knocking and mail,” a Republican official said. “It’s early and we have a long way to go, but the story so far is that Republicans are doing better and Democrats are doing worse.”

Republicans unaffiliated with the GOTV foreign effort aren’t so sure, however. “I can’t help but feel that Harris has a better operation than we do,” said one Georgia Republican political operative. “Look at what they’re doing. Harris and Walz seem more focused on reaching beyond the grassroots, doing all this stuff here with Liz Cheney and whoever else. It looks like they’re in persuasion mode and they’re smart enough to know what they should be doing at this point.”

Meanwhile, poor Anzelone just wishes everyone would stop doing this. We’ll find out who won soon enough, and poring over early voting numbers to divine hidden meanings isn’t helpful.

“As a middle-aged, mildly depressed guy, I have enough anxiety to deal with without hearing about early votes or exit polls or whatever,” he said. “Should you be scared by early voting numbers? I doubt it. What I would do is put that anxiety on the shelf of a closet and get on with your day. This is advice based on years of looking at early voting data and proving it doesn’t mean a damn thing. End quote.”