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3 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
One measure of how absentee ballots became partisan over time in Georgia: the partisanship of absentee ballot requests by date
In April, the early absentee ballot requests were overwhelmingly GOP after the primary was delayed and the SOS mailed out absentee requests.
Over time, Trump polarized the issue and Democrats became far likelier to apply. wrdw.com/content/news/G…
The y-axis is the share of applicants (with a record of partisan voting) who are recent Democratic primary voters. GA doesn't have party registration, so it's the best we've got
It's worth keeping this in mind as you look at the requests for the GA runoff. A huge number of these ballots were requested back in April. The folks requesting ballots now are overwhelmingly Democratic

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More from @Nate_Cohn

Nate Cohn Profile picture
2 Dec
No actual disagreement
To the extent there's a disagreement (and I wouldn't even call it that), it's about a very valid question about when (and potentially how) to allocate voters of 'unknown' race in GA. Whether you do so doesn't affect the conclusion, but it's being used to imply that it does
As long as I've been at the Times, none of my GA analyses have allocated 'unknown' voters. That's in part because you wade into the debate about how to do it, which seems unnecessary if it doesn't materially affect your findings--as in this case
Read 10 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
29 Nov
I see a lot of talk about this article, and I don't think it's really worth any attention my part. I will take this as an opportunity to highlight something fairly tragic about this election: we don't really know what happened in the detail we'd like
Obviously, the election outcome is quite a bit different than in 2016--at least for the purposes of determining control of government.
But from the standpoint of the numbers, this was just not a very different election from 2016 in many of the states that matter most--like PA/WI
We're talking about, what, a ~2 pt swing nationwide and in many of the critical battleground states? Without fantastic data, it's just too small for us to decompose that modest movement in terms of turnout, changes in the composition of eligible voters, changes in attitudes, etc
Read 14 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
28 Nov
The evidence for a 'rigged' election is so preposterous as of late that it's difficult to argue that any series of reforms would have avoided this mess
You've got folks convinced that there were more votes than people in Detroit. All you have to do is do is google search 'detroit population' and 'detroit election results 2020' to learn that it's wrong
You've got folks convinced that there were fewer mail ballot requests than mail votes in Pennsylvania. A google search can disabuse you here, as well--and worst of all this was clear before the election
Read 9 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
21 Nov
Biden now leads by 3.86 points nationwide, per @Redistrict popular vote tracker, matching Obama's 3.86 pt win in 2012. He'll exceed it soon.
They won by similar amounts in very different ways. Here's the shift in presidential results between 2012 and 2020
Most of this swing occurs from 2012-2016, with relative stability between 2016 and 2020
The 2016-2020 swing is barely even worth mention on the 2012-2016 scale, at least outside of heavily Latino areas and ATL/DAL.
If we narrow the scale to tease out this cycle's subtler shifts, suburban movement stands out a bit more but still isn't always overwhelming
Read 4 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
20 Nov
One interesting thing about this election is the extent that the 2016 post-mortems and subsequent arguments for how Democrats should win--by basically everyone!--don't necessarily look great in retrospect.
There were basically two major diagnoses for Clinton's win--and two main arguments for how Dems should win going forward. Neither is how Biden pulled it off
One theory was that Trump won by flipping white, working class Obama voters, and therefore Dems needed to lure them back--maybe with a populist economic pitch.
I think that explanation for Trump's win was accurate,
but Biden had very, very limited success with Obama-Trump vote
Read 11 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
20 Nov
The thing that's most dispiriting about the 'vote dump' charts (which purport to show irregularities, but just show large Dem. cities reporting), is that it's in such complete bad faith that there's no way the electoral process could be reformed to guard against it going forward
Take mail voting, for instance. If you wanted to restore the credibility of the electoral process, you could eliminate no-excuse mail voting on the grounds that it's no longer credible to a wide swath of the electorate, even if you thought their concerns were completely wrong
The 'vote dumps,' OTOH, are an inevitable artifact of how jurisdiction reports their votes in batches, rather than updating their tally vote by vote. There's really nothing you can do to avoid this. Taking issue with it just means you don't believe election results, period
Read 5 tweets

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