close
close

Association-anemone

Bite-sized brilliance in every update

    • What early voting data shows about new voters, a group that could change the 2024 election
    asane

    What early voting data shows about new voters, a group that could change the 2024 election

    Online Niel Posted on

    With nearly 60 million ballots already cast, everyone interested in presidential elections trying to figure out where the race is.

    Despite so many votes being cast, it’s hard to know what they mean. Many more people have not yet voted and it is not known exactly how many there will be or how they will be divided. But there is one measure in the early voting data that may be more suggestive of the final results: the number of new voters who have already cast ballots.

    An NBC News Decision Desk analysis of state voter data shows that as of Oct. 30, there are signs of an influx of new Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and new male Republican voters in Arizona, two of the most important swing states.

    Early votes from new voters — voters who didn’t turn out in 2020 — are of particular interest because they are votes that could change what happens in 2024 from the last presidential election. (Who voted in 2020 and isn’t showing this time is also important, but it’s impossible to know before Election Day.)

    Already, the number of new voters in many of the seven closest battleground states exceeds the 2020 margin between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. In Pennsylvania, for example, Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 80,555 votes. This year, more than 100,000 new voters have already cast their ballots in Pennsylvania, with more to come.

    We can’t know how these new voters voted, but by considering who they are, we can offer clues about how 2024 might differ from 2020. Party registration doesn’t perfectly predict a voter’s choice, but new voters who choose to register as Democrats are more likely to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than not, and new voters who register as Republicans are more likely to vote for Trump. As a result, in swing states where voters can officially register for a party (Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), new party-affiliated voters may provide some clues about the 2024 election.

    (In Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where voters don’t officially register with a party, all we can do to predict the partisanship of new voters is based on local voting patterns and demographics — data that can be quite noisy and sometimes wrong .)

    The gender of new voters in battleground states is also public data, shedding light on the relationship between gender and party registration among new voters amid elections that hinge on a range of gender-related political issues, such as abortion. (Some states also offer a “nonbinary” or “other” option on their voter registration forms, which few voters have used so far.)

    Democratic women dominate the number of new voters in Pennsylvania

    So what are the new voters telling us so far? Let’s start in Pennsylvania – not only because it is thought to be the closest state according to the pollsbut also because the number of new voters who voted there already exceeded the margin from 2020. If everyone in 2020 voted for the same candidate again, those new voters would decide the race.

    Data from Pennsylvania show wide differences in the number of votes cast by new voters, both by party registration and by gender. More new voters are registered Democrats than Republicans, and female new voters lead that partisan gap. New male voters are only slightly more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, but among new female voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1.

    The number of new voters who choose not to officially register with either party complicates the picture, however, as the number of new unaffiliated voters is nearly the same as the difference between the number of New Democrats and New Republicans. That means unaffiliated voting could either erase or expand the advantage that registered Democrats currently have among new early voters.

    The opposite trend in Arizona: Male Republicans lead the way

    Turning to Arizona, the opposite pattern emerges. While there are fewer new voters than in Pennsylvania — in part because early voting in Arizona started later — the 2020 margin in Arizona was also much smaller: just 10,457 votes.

    Already, the number of new voters (86,231 on Tuesday) is more than eight times the 2020 Biden-Trump margin in Arizona. And the largest share of this group of new Arizona voters so far are Republican men.

    New voters are also slightly more likely to be registered Republicans than Democrats in the state, unlike in Pennsylvania. But so far, the Republican advantage among new voters in Arizona is largely driven by male voters.

    Yet again, the number of new voters who choose not to affiliate with any party is sizable, and how they choose to vote could easily change the apparent Republican registration advantage among new early voters.

    A mixed picture in the other swing states

    Looking at the other five swing states reveals a variety of patterns—and no clear conclusion.

    In Michigan, there is an apparent huge difference in the behavior of new male and female voters, although conclusions in Michigan are complicated by the fact that there is no registration by party there and by the difficulty of predicting the partisanship of Michigan voters without this data, which has we have seen big errors in the past. But based on these estimates, the models suggest that Democratic women are slightly outnumbering Republican women among new voters. The same estimates suggest that new Republican men nearly double the number of new Democratic men.

    Wisconsin, like Michigan, also seems to suggest a strong link between gender and partisanship among new voters — with new female voters breaking for Democrats and new male voters breaking slightly for Republicans. However, the number of new voters expected to be unaffiliated calls for extreme caution in trying to read too much into these estimates.

    In the other states with actual party registration data—North Carolina and Nevada—there is a new pattern: Unaffiliated voters are the largest group of new voters ever, among both men and women. How these independents vote is obviously critical and also unknown – again highlighting the difficulty of drawing strong conclusions using early voting data.

    Josh Clinton / NBC News

    That said, one thing is clear: These voters could be decisive, as the number of votes cast by new 2024 voters already exceeds the margin in many of the closest states in 2020. They enter a polarized electorate and a choice many expect to be. almost And except in a few states, where available data is beginning to suggest a larger story, the number of new unaffiliated voters — or the lack of party registration in key states — makes it difficult to know exactly how early voting will translate into election results. from this year.

    In such cases, peering into the guts of aggregate early voting reports in the hope of extracting a prediction about what’s to come seems like an exercise in futility. Our pro tip: Go for a walk and enjoy the fall weather.

    Online Niel
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like