Thread by @tbonier

I'm hoping to have the time to write something longer/more detailed on the early vote in the battlegrounds in the next day or two. But for now, a brief thread explaining why I think a lot of the EV analyses are getting it wrong, and how complex this all is this year.

I'm going to use NC as the example, but we could really use any state and find generally the same thing.

Taken at a high level, the early vote data in NC would appear to be very good for the GOP. At this point in 2020 the EV was +22 Dem, and right now it is +1 D. But let's talk about why it's a lot more complicated than that.

A national NBC poll last week showed that about half of voters plan to cast an early vote this year. That's a big number, but still down substantially from the almost two-thirds of voters who cast an early vote in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

Assuming turnout roughly even with 2020 (about 160MM votes cast nationwide) this means that there will be about 26 million fewer early votes cast this year, relative to 2020.

But here's the thing, it's not as simple as thinking that voting method conversions will be entirely from early to election day. The GOP acknowledged that they made a tactical error in shunning early voting in 2020 and have invested heavily in getting their voters out early.

So realistically this means that you will see massive numbers of Democrats converting from early to Election Day, and massive numbers of Republicans doing the opposite, in order to land at the numbers cited upthread, about half of ballots cast before Election Day.

Leaving NC for a second, PA is a great example of this. A whopping 40% of registered GOP early voters (this is mail in PA) voted on Election Day in 2020, as compared to only 11% of registered Dem early voters.

Back to NC. So the GOP appears to be doing much better in the early vote... because they are. But is that a sign of great intensity for the GOP? It is almost impossible to say.

The graphic upthread showed party reg shares of early votes cast in NC so far. But this one shows turnout as a percent of all registered voters in each group, and perhaps paints a clearer picture.

Here we can see that turnout is down, relative to this point in 2020 among all parties. But the GOP is much closer to their 2020 turnout than Dems. Which is entirely consistent with what one would expect, based on everything I've noted in this thread.

So what does this mean for early vote analysis? It means that something that was already difficult before the massive vote mode shifts we're seeing happening this year will be exponentially more difficult. Which means we will see exponentially more bad analyses. Buyer beware.

Again, I hope to write more on this, but my general approach to looking at the early vote this year is to stay in this context of expected vote mode shifting - so when the early vote looks close to 2020 (or better) for Dems, that is a very good sign for Dems.

But to be clear, when it looks worse for Dems (like NC), we are left with the question of how much worse is problematic for Dems/a good sign of intensity for GOPs. And no one can answer that question. Sorry. It's just relative, where we can compare states on the same yardstick.