One important thing to remember as we continue to digest the election results, especially around swings with Hispanics: some of what we saw was due to turnout differentials, not just vote switching. We still don't have vote history for most states, but here is one minor example. In Delaware, Hispanic voters were 4% of the turnout this year. In 2020, by party registration, the Hispanics who voted were +46.9 Dem, but in 2024 they were +36.7 Dem. The total turnout from Dem Hispanics was roughly equal to 2020, but 35% more GOP Hispanics voted this year.

I've been looking at the universe of voters in GA who cast a ballot in 2020, but didn't vote in 2024 and are still registered in the state. There are just over 1 million such voters. Not surprisingly, they are modeled as more likely Dems. One of the biggest drop-off groups in Georgia was younger Black men. 132,036 Black men under the age of 35 voted in 2020 and are still registered there, 58,151 of them didn't vote in this election (44%). For comparison, the dropoff among young Black women was 30%.

I spent a little time this morning looking over voter registration data over the course of the election in various states, looking for signs in retrospect of a Trump win. Looking at PA, something jumps out that I think is instructive as to the path forward. Much of the conversation around the future of the D emparty/the need to fix the brand with "working class" voters centers around white voters. But something different emerges in the new voter reg data that speaks to the need for Dems to invest in organizing communities of color.

Our team worked with the folks at Hart Research, in a project for PSG Consulting that produced some very interesting results. Both surveys looked at different angles of campaign advertising/media consumption. Here are a few highlights: The Hart survey looked at swing voters in battleground states, who found the negative ads about Trump most memorable, followed by the positive Harris ads. Trump ads were less memorable (perhaps suggesting his broader media strategy, podcasts, etc, was much more effective?).

We won't have the full picture of turnout differentials for a while (states take weeks to months to publish Election Day individual turnout history) but looking at county data a bit of a pattern is emerging. Outside of the battlegrounds, similar to 2022, Dem turnout seems to have cratered, and there were likely GOP persuasion gains, resulting in those bigger swings in states like NY, NJ, MA, FL, etc

Facing several somewhat overwhelming questions and realities this morning. First, why the data that gave me optimism that Harris could win was just wrong, or at least my interpretation of it was. It will take some time for all of the data necessary to answer these questions is available. But there are many bitter truths to acknowledge this morning.

My election eve reminder - during election day and in the first couple of hours after polls close, the ratio between the appetite for data that tells us how things are going to the predictive value of that data is just massive. In 2022 people were sharing election day turnout data from a handful of precincts in two states, and drawing inferences across the country, suggesting Dems were doomed. That was wrong.

A few quick thoughts on NV early vote, since I'm sensing an irrational Dem freakout taking place there. 1) It is still quite early. The total turnout so far is just 25% of the final early vote in 2020, and 38% of the 2022 early vote. We're going to see a lot more votes cast there, and the numbers will move around during that time.

A bunch of people have shared this with me, asking what I think. So this will be a mini-thread on that topic.

The tldr version is, if those numbers are accurate (or close to accurate) it is a very good sign for Harris. And they are plausible, but they could also just be wrong.

https://twitter.com/blankslate2017/status/1849469028084920628

So theoretically, polling of people who already voted should be more accurate than a likely voter poll, because it is a known universe of voters, so you can quota/weight to the exact right audience, and verify turnout history.

I've gotten a lot of questions about what I think about the NV early vote, so here's a quick thread. From a party share of the EV, there has obviously been a substantial gap closing relative to 2020, where at this point it was +16D, and right now it is +2D. Of course, while I wouldn't compare raw numbers in a presidential to a midterm, it is worth pointing out that, at this point in 2022 the EV in NV was just +3D, and things turned out fine for Dems then.

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.

This week marks the point where I believe we will have enough early voting data in key states to begin to talk about what we're seeing with more regularity, so I wanted to share some thoughts about what we can and cannot do with this dataset. 1) Early voting data will not tell us who is going to win. Just like a poll won't either. It provides important context. The right way to do this is to use EV data to inform polls and vice versa.

Some MI mail/early voting stats:

The gender gap (women +11.9) is currently bigger than the gap was at this point in 2020 and 2022. A lot of that is being driven by huge turnout from Black women. Black voters overall are accounting for a substantially larger share of the votes cast thus far, relative to the same point in '20 or '22.

Okay, we're finally getting to the point where there is enough early vote in several key states to begin to watch for emerging trends. So I'll kick off my first early vote thread of 2024 with a look at Pennsylvania. One quick note before we begin - for the sake of brevity I will generally refer to all ballots cast before election day as "early votes", regardless of how they were cast (mail, early in person, etc). I may talk about mode from time to time, but generally just combine them all.

Reupping this from last night ICYMI. I hope you'll click through to the substack post, but here are some key points:

https://twitter.com/tbonier/status/1844189171088490722

Looking at the Quinnipiac polls yesterday, they are based on likely voter models that assume GOPs will have more intensity and therefore higher turnout. Clearly, that is one key to Trump's path to victory, along with Dems (esp younger) being demobilized.

So this is going to be super in the weeds, but I will keep it relatively short. I think this will be key to understanding/analyzing the early vote this year. And explains how I think the GOP will use early vote data to falsely claim that they are winning/have momentum. First, remember that one key element of early vote analysis is comparing to prior cycles. While there is a tactical advantage for the party that can bank more votes early, that by itself isn't indicative of a turnout/enthusiasm advantage.

We're seeing wide discrepancies in the polling of key subgroups with Dem underperformance in national polls that doesn't show up when these groups are polled with large sample specialty surveys. Mostly among young voters and voters of color. For example, today's CNN poll showing a 1 pt national Harris lead shows her with a relative narrow lead with young voters. We've seen this elsewhere. But the Harvard/IOP poll shows Harris with a bigger lead than Biden 2020 with the same voters!

I've seen a lot of mostly GOP-aligned accounts here in recent days/weeks sharing voter registration stats for the past 4 years showing GOP advantages in voter registration. These stats are generally quite misleading, here's why. The biggest reason: their exclusion of unaffiliated voters in their stats, and a failure to further explore who is registering unaffiliated. The reality is that Gen Z is less likely to register with a party, but still overwhelmingly Dem.

So over the past couple of days, Nate Silver has been tweeting multiple times a day insisting that things are looking worse and worse for the Harris campaign.

One state he claims has moved 1.2 pts to Trump since the convention is WI. Let's take a look at the recent polls there. 6 of 10 post convention polls show Harris leading, by an average margin of 7 points. But the two GOP highschool kids' poll has the race even, Trafalgar (leaders of the red wave polls of '22) have Trump up 1, and then one Dem pollster I'm not familiar with had the race even.

We now have voter file updates for 38 states that cover the week of July 21st, affording us the opportunity to quantify the reaction of the electorate to VP Harris as the nominee. Our analysis compares new registrations during the week of 7/21/2024 to the same week in 2020, for the sake of consistency. Overall, total registrations were actually slightly down in 2024, relative to 2020 (289k to 283k). But what do the subgroups show?

At long last, we have a PA voter file update that includes the week of July 21st, after VP Harris ascended to the top of the ticket.... Okay, first, when compared to the same week in 2020, total new registrations increased by 34.3% in PA in the week following Biden's withdrawal. Dem registration increased by 46.6%, GOP by 21.1%.