The idea that you can't learn anything from the early vote is silly. Can you predict who is going to win? Absolutely not. But we have answered two very important broad questions already by assessing the early vote:
1) Will turnout be high?
The answer here is clearly yes. We've sailed past 2016 early vote totals, with a week remaining. Yes, a big part of this is due to the pandemic. But the fact that 1 in 4 of these early voters didn't vote in '16 points towards very high overall turnout.
2) Are Democrats energized?
Yes. In some states, core Dem constituencies have already surpassed their TOTAL turnout in the '16 election. We not only know Dems are showing up, from the early vote we can assess relative intensity among subgroups.
In the end, the assessment of the early vote leaves us with two very important unanswered questions: will Republicans be able to match Democratic intensity, and how much crossover voting will take place? In the end we'll have to wait until next Tuesday to answer those questions.
And as an important side note, we will have a rough sense by next Tuesday of just how deep of a hole Trump will have to dig himself out of on Election Day, and we'll be able to place that in context of the remaining non-voting electorate.
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In 6 battleground states, black voters over the age of 65 have already exceeded their overall 2016 turnout numbers, thereby already setting turnout records with 6 days still remaining: AZ, FL, GA, NC, NV, TX.
In NC, GA, and TX Asian voters have already surpassed their 2016 overall turnout numbers, also setting turnout records with 6 days remaining. What's more, in AZ, FL, MI, and NV Asian seniors have surpassed their 2016 total vote numbers.
It's impossible to attribute these turnout surges to anything definitively, but some thoughts:
- Representation matters. Senator Kamala Harris has seemingly engaged AAPI voters, a group who historically have voted at very low rates.
I tweet a lot about the people who didn't vote in '16 and have already cast an early ballot in this election. But let me take a second to talk about the 4,193,175 early voters who are voting for the first time in their life.
It won't come as a surprise that a huge portion of these voters are young - almost 40% are under the age of 30. But voters of all ages have decided to vote for the first time ever in this election. Over half a million Americans over the age of 65 have cast their first ballot!
These first time voters are much more likely to be unmarried women, relative to past elections, and relative to any other group. They account for almost 36% of these new voters.
I tweet a lot about the youth vote and not much about seniors, so here's a thread digging into what will likely be a crucial voting bloc this year.
In '16 seniors accounted for 25% of all ballots cast. As of now they account for 39% of all early votes cast - 20M votes.
Almost 3M of these early voting seniors didn't vote in the '16 election, and 472,195 are voting for the first time in their life. This surge is being driven largely by white, college educated seniors, who have seen their vote share increase by 8pts over this same point in '16.
This is somewhat wild, turnout among college educated white seniors is already at 78% of their final total vote in the 2016 general, while current early vote turnout among non-college white seniors is only at 49% of their overall 2016 turnout.
In which two Republican accounts with substantial numbers of followers incorrectly claim that the youth vote is down in the early vote. Here's the truth...
Voters under the age of 30 now account for a larger share of the electorate than they did at this point in '16. And that's while older voters are surging on their own.
It's not just a youth surge though, the younger voters who are fueling this massive turnout increase are more likely to be Dems. At this point Dems have a lead of almost 30 pts in modeled partisanship, up from 21 pts at this point in 2016.
I've gotten a lot of questions as to why I think our TargetEarly site shows a GOP lead, while we've seen huge turnout in Dem areas. Indulge me for a few tweets to explain why I believe the early vote in Texas is indicative of a state very much in play for Joe Biden.
Look at the modeled party ID of the early vote in TX. The most important note here, this isn't a model of candidate support, but rather generic partisanship, a metric that isn't generally favorable to Dems in TX. Dems trail by 10.8% so far there.
But compare that to 2018 at this same point in time in TX. Dems trailed in the EV by 14.1%, meaning the 2020 EV electorate is 3.3% more Democratic than the 2018 electorate, which in the end resulted in a highly competitive US Senate election. That's the first good sign for Biden.