Wonderful. 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: what is going on with the early vote numbers, and are they as dire for Democrats as some anxious partisans are claiming? His answer: “Stop. Just stop. Do not go down the rabbit hole. It means nothing. Don’t ever even look at it. Every email that comes in with updated numbers I delete before even opening.”
This question–what the early vote numbers tell us, if anything–has consumed endless hours on cable news shows and miles of overwrought posts on social media since some of the battleground states kicked off early voting last week. As Election Day has morphed into Election Fortnight the angst and low-grade dread that used to be reserved for the first Tuesday afternoon in November now hangs around for weeks.
Most smart political analysts agree with Anzelone — the early vote numbers tell you next to nothing about who is going to win. Votes count the same, after all, whether they come in on November 5th or before. For several cycles now analysts have jumped on early vote numbers to show that a shocking and unforeseen result in a given state is imminent, only for that balloon to pop on election day as more voters come out and longstanding partisan alignments reassert themselves.
Still, that hasn’t stopped political operatives from both sides – but especially the GOP – from insisting that the numbers are good for them and devastating to the other side. And Republicans do have some reasons to be feeling good. In Nevada, for example, 24,000 more registered Republicans have voted than Democrats as of Friday in a state where Democratic strength in the powerful culinary unions has been thought to give them an edge – and where recent elections have seen Democrats lead early voting. In Arizona, Republicans are outperforming Democrats 42%-36% among the early vote — another reversal of expectations and trends. In North Carolina the GOP has a razor-thin lead, where the conventional wisdom would have had Democrats meaningfully ahead. And even in Pennsylvania where Democrats have a double-digit advantage in returned ballots, Republicans have still made massive gains over their 2022 and 2020 performances in the early vote. (Michigan and Wisconsin don’t offer party registration breakdowns for early voting, but there is fuzzier equivalent game going on in those states analyzing county data.)
Democrats are, meanwhile, offering various forms of the message chill. At Harris headquarters, a memo was passed around recently making a case for how little early vote matters to the final outcome. It is the position of the Harris campaign that Republicans, by instructing their rank and file to vote early this election, are simply pulling votes forward by days or weeks without meaningfully raising the party’s ultimate total. Plus, while the early vote data might reveal party registration, it does not reveal how anyone actually voted. The game plans for both campaigns rely on some meaningful number of voters registered with the one side voting for theirs. And while the early vote is thought to be a proxy for base enthusiasm, as one Republican operative put it, no matter what the early vote numbers show there is little doubt that Democrats come out to vote against Donald Trump.
“Ever since Trump has been on the ballot the one thing Democrats do not lack is enthusiasm, so if they vote now or vote on election day, it doesn’t really matter,” the operative said. “They are definitely going to be voting.”
The returned Republican ballots in Pennsylvania largely come from voters who cast a ballot in 2020, a sign that the early vote isn’t bringing new voters to the polls so much as cannibalizing the election day vote. This would be an especially good sign for Democrats, since the Trump theory of victory relies on first-time and low-propensity voters coming to the polls, according to Tom Bonier, the 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 needed to change the makeup of the electorate to find an advantage that wasn’t there four years ago,” he said. “They need to turn out young people and people who don’t regularly vote — and there is no evidence of that materializing.”
A large reason for the strong Republican showing so far is that Donald Trump, after disparaging in-person and by-mail early voting in 2020, has been sending at least some new messages on the topic. “Swamp the vote” signs are displayed above his rallies, and Trump told the podcaster Don Bongino last week that “I am telling everyone to vote early” (though he also called early voting “stupid stuff” and suggesting that vote-by-mail is rife with fraud). The rest of the party and the SuperPAC’s pouring money into Trump’s re-election however been less conflicted, pummeling prime Republican voters with mailers and digital outreach urging them to come to the polls in such numbers that the 2024 election becomes “too big to rig.”
The perils however of comparing early vote from this year to previous election cycles is that widespread early voting is so new that it is nearly impossible to draw lessons from one year to the next. The midterm electorate, either voting 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 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 prior to that election, early vote and vote-by-mail had been largely the provenance of Republicans.
Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science 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 ballot, are not particularly indicative of the eventual outcome. But as we get closer to Election Day, he said, the early vote starts to become more predictive of the eventual outcome than polls. In 2016 and 2020, while polls had Democrats winning North Carolina, McDonald’s analysis of early vote totals told him (correctly) that the polls were wrong. Analyzing vote data, he said, is similar to how pollsters model the electorate when they construct their surveys, looking at past voting patterns and making adjustments based on the demographics of the early vote totals and factoring in changes in state voting laws. “It’s all information you want to take in, and in a lot of cases it is more of a true signal than what most polls tell you.”
McDonald said he would have to wait until early voting ends in the weekend before Election Day to get a clearer picture of the state of the race, but for now, “It has been a good early vote 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 have been in the early state of the early voting period. If the trajectory stays on track, we are going to have a very close election again.”
Sophisticated campaigns use the early vote data in order to find out which of their reliable voters have not yet shown up. Democrats have a 0-100 “contactability score” for every battleground state voter, and until their targeted voters mail in their ballots the Harris campaign will bombard them with micro-targeted digital ads, mailers and door-knocks until they do. Over on the Republican side the field operation has been largely turned over to two SuperPACs, one headed by Elon Musk and the other by conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. It is an unusual arrangement, but Republicans involved in the effort say the strong early vote totals show that critics have been wrong to doubt them. “We have hit all of our metrics, and surpassed all of our goals in terms of door-knocking and mail,” said one Republican official. “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 outside GOTV effort however aren’t so sure. “I just can’t help but feel like Harris has a better operation than we do,” said one Georgia Republican political operative. “Just look at what they are doing. Harris and Walz seem more focused on reaching out beyond the base, doing all this stuff here with Liz Cheney and whoever else. It seems like they are in persuasion mode and they are smart enough to know what they are supposed to be doing right now.”
Meanwhile, poor Anzelone just wishes everyone would stop doing this. We are going to find out who won soon enough, and poring over the early vote numbers to divine hidden meanings isn’t helpful.
“As a middle-aged mildly depressive guy, I have enough anxiety to deal with without hearing about early votes or exit polls or any of it,” he said. “Should you be freaked out by the early vote numbers? I doubt it. What I would do is put that anxiety on a closet shelf and go on with your day. This is advice based on years of experience of looking at early vote data and having it turn out to not mean a fucking thing. Quote end quote.”
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