Politics

Reading the early vote tea leaves

‘It’s on a trajectory to look like it’s going to be a close election.’
Ashley Herman holds up a sticker after voting on the first day of early voting in the general election Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

More than 17.7 million Americans have cast ballots with two weeks to go before Election Day, as campaigns chase voters to the polls and bank votes ahead of what is likely to be one of the most contentious and narrowly fought elections in modern history.

State laws governing how, and when, a voter can cast a ballot vary wildly. In some states, the first voters received their ballots more than a month ago. In others, onerous absentee ballot laws mean that only a fraction of the electorate will get a chance to register their votes early.

Pluribus News spoke with some of the nation’s leading early vote experts to answer the most fundamental question the myriad data points raise: What does this all mean for candidates running for the White House, seats in Congress and even the statehouse?

Who, in short, is building an advantage?

Here are seven things we learned:

Voter enthusiasm is real. For a century, America grappled with tumbling turnout rates as voters tuned out of politics. Then something happened — maybe it was former President Donald Trump’s election in 2020, or maybe voters just decided to care again — and turnout rates rebounded. The 2020 presidential contest featured the highest turnout of any election since women won the right to vote a century before.

Early signs indicate that this golden era of voter turnout is still present. North Carolina and Georgia both recorded their highest number of votes cast on the first day of early voting, and voting rates are up over the 2020 contest in most states where good data is available.

Republicans have embraced the early vote. In previous elections, Republicans waited to vote until Election Day. That’s changing, and now more Republican voters are showing up early.

Take North Carolina: In 2020, registered Democrats accounted for 46% of the early vote by this point, and Republicans made up just 25%. This year, they’re near parity: 35% of early voters are Democrats and 34% are Republicans.

Republicans “never keep up with Democrats in early voting. And this year, they’re keeping up,” said Mike Rusher, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party. “The electorate is older, it’s more male, it’s less African American and it’s more Republican and less Democratic.”

We heard the same thing in many other states: While Republicans are still reluctant to vote by mail, they are showing up to cast their votes early at rates not seen before. That’s some cause for concern among Democratic strategists, but — as nearly everyone told us — it’s still early.

Democrats still dominate mail. For years, Trump has cast suspicion on voting by mail — to the chagrin of his own party. Today, Democrats are still far more likely to vote by mail than are Republicans.

“We’re still seeing that Republicans are resistant to voting by mail,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who tracks early voting.

Take Pennsylvania, a state that doesn’t have in-person early voting: In 2020, Democrats accounted for almost three-quarters of mail-in votes. This year, they make up two-thirds of the early vote. That’s an improvement for Republicans, but it’s still a hole to dig out of.

Florida is illustrative of the last two trends put together, said Paul Westcott, executive vice president of L2, a nonpartisan data and analytics firm that tracks early voting. Voters in liberal Miami-Dade and Broward counties are disproportionately voting by mail. Voters in redder counties to the north are disproportionately casting in-person votes early.

Women, whites and the wealthy. Those who have showed up so far are disproportionately women, white voters and wealthier voters. About 23% of the electorate so far makes more than $150,000 a year, compared with their 17% share of the population. Women make up 54% of the electorate, greater than their share. And whites make up about 79% of those who have voted.

“Women are the big story here,” Westcott said. “Women are outpacing men in some of these states by so much that it’s going to be difficult to close the gap.”

McDonald put it a little differently: “There are a lot of women voting, which is what we typically expect with early voting,” he said. If that trend holds, “Election Day is going to be the world’s largest sausage party.”

Early voters are super voters. Those who have cast a ballot already were always going to vote. People who vote early tend to be high-information, highly partisan voters who already know which candidate they prefer. The share of first-time voters who have already cast a ballot is up from four years ago, but not substantially so.

“There’s not a ton of youth energy or first-time voter energy,” Westcott said.

But by banking their votes early, voters are helping their respective sides: Once a voter casts a ballot, campaigns can stop targeting them with get-out-the-vote messaging and focus more on lower propensity voters.

“For every continuous high propensity voter that’s voted, [the parties] get to shift that focus to lower propensity voters,” Rusher said. “They get to move on and go chase down a non-active, lazy voter who maybe needs another two or three contacts before they decide to go vote.”

Demographics will change. Younger voters tend to wait until the weekend before Election Day to turn out in droves. So too do Black voters, many of whom go to vote after church services in what they call souls-to-the-polls drives that happen over the final few weekends before Election Day.

“Right now, the age skew is heavily toward older people. We expect that,” McDonald said. “Younger people tend to be more diverse, so that last week we’ll see the age distribution shift, we’ll see the race and Hispanic ethnicity distribution shift and become more diverse.”

Don’t panic. The one constant we heard from every expert: Don’t freak out about the early voting numbers. Whichever party you favor, the one thing every early voting expert agrees on is that, with 14 days to go before Election Day, it’s impossible to extrapolate results based on early turnout.

“I still think it’s way too early. The best way I think we can describe it is: It’s on a trajectory to look like it’s going to be a close election,” McDonald said. “We can’t draw very solid inferences now.”

Westcott pointed out that the availability of early voting varies by election cycle — and that the conditions have changed substantially since 2020, when the world was in the grips of a full-blown pandemic. In the years since, many states have expanded early voting opportunities, so more people have the ability to vote early than ever before.

“If you’re going to do comparisons with previous election years, it’s not bad thing,” Westcott said. “Just realize that there are limitations in terms of the depth of knowledge you have.”

Want to see who’s turning out in your state? The University of Florida’s Election Lab, the data firm L2, and the Democratic data firm TargetSmart all offer up-to-the-minute early voting dashboards that are fun to play around with.