Trump could win early voting. Should Harris panic?

Wonderful. But who do you choose?
Photo: Jonathan Drake/REUTERS

“Oh God no, why are you calling me about this?” said John Anzelone, a pollster for Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates. “Are you trying to piss me off?”

Anzelone had just gotten off the phone with one of his clients, a congressman running for reelection, who was asking the same thing I was asking: What's going on with the early voting numbers and are they as bad for Democrats as some others? say concerned partisans? His answer: “Stop. Just stop. Don't go down the rabbit hole. It means nothing. Never look at it. I delete any email with updated numbers before I even open it.”

This question — what, if anything, the early voting numbers tell us — has consumed endless hours on cable news shows and miles of edited social media posts since some of the battleground states began early voting last week. As Election Day has morphed into the four-week election weeks, the fear and base anxiety once reserved for the first Tuesday afternoon in November now persists for weeks.

Most smart political analysts agree with Anzelone – the early voting numbers say next to nothing about who will win. Ultimately, votes count the same whether they are received on November 5th or earlier. For several cycles, analysts have turned to early voting numbers to show that a shocking and unforeseen result is imminent in a particular state, only for that balloon to pop on Election Day as more voters cast their ballots and long-standing partisan coalitions reassert themselves.

Still, that hasn't stopped political activists from both sides — but especially the Republican Party — from insisting that the numbers are good for them and devastating for the other side. And Republicans have some reasons to feel good. In Nevada, for example, 24,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats voted on Friday, in a state where Democrats' strength in the powerful food service unions is said to give them an advantage – and where Democrats have won early voting in recent elections were at the top. In Arizona, Republicans are outperforming Democrats in early voting by 42-36%, another reversal of expectations and trends. The GOP has a razor-thin lead in North Carolina, where conventional wisdom would have given Democrats a significant lead. And even in Pennsylvania, where Democrats have a double-digit lead in returned ballots, Republicans still made massive gains in early voting compared to their results in 2022 and 2020. (Michigan and Wisconsin do not provide a breakdown of party registration for early voting, but in those states there is a fuzzier, equivalent game when analyzing precinct data.)

Democrats, meanwhile, are offering different forms of messaging cool. A memo was recently passed around Harris headquarters outlining how little early voting mattered to the final result. The Harris campaign's position is that by instructing their base to vote early in this election, Republicans are simply advancing votes by days or weeks without significantly increasing the party's final total. And while early voting data could shed light on party registration, it doesn't reveal how someone actually voted. The game plans for both campaigns are based on a significant number of registered voters voting for their campaigns on the one hand. And while early voting is believed to be a sign of grassroots enthusiasm, as one Republican activist put it, there is little doubt that Democrats are committed to voting against Donald Trump, no matter what the numbers of early voting.

“Since Trump was elected, Democrats have not lacked enthusiasm. So whether they vote now or on election day doesn’t matter,” the activist said. “They will definitely vote.”

The returned Republican ballots in Pennsylvania largely come from voters who cast ballots in 2020, a sign that early voting isn't so much bringing new voters to the polls as it is cannibalizing voting on Election Day. This would be a particularly good sign for Democrats because the Trump theory of victory relies on first-time and low-propensity voters turning out, according to Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data company.

“If I'm Trump, I'm a little more worried than the Harris campaign because the Trump campaign had to change the composition of the electorate to find an advantage that didn't exist four years ago,” he said. “You need to get young people and people who don’t vote regularly to vote – and there’s no evidence that’s happening.”

A big reason for Republicans' strong showing so far is that Donald Trump, after disparaging early voting in person and by mail in 2020, has sent at least some new messages on the issue. Signs reading “Swamp the vote” are posted above his rallies, and last week Trump told podcaster Don Bongino that “I tell everyone to vote early” (though he also called early voting “stupid stuff” and suggested postal voting). is full of fraud). But the rest of the party and the SuperPAC pouring money into Trump's re-election were less conflicted, showering top Republican voters with mailers and digital outreach to urge them to turn out in such large numbers that the 2024 election would be ” becomes too big to be manipulated.” ”

The danger of comparing early voting this year to previous election cycles, however, is that widespread early voting is so new that it is nearly impossible to draw lessons from one year to the next. The midterm electorate, regardless of whether they vote early or not, is older, whiter and wealthier than the presidential electorate. 2020 was the Covid year – for Democrats, postal voting became a public signal that they were taking the pandemic seriously, while for Republicans, waiting until Election Day – at Trump's urging – represented a symbolic rejection of lockdowns and social distancing. But before this election, early voting and absentee voting were largely reserved for Republicans.
Michael P. McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who tracks early voting, agrees that the first few days of early voting, when what he calls “super voters” come to cast their ballots, are not The final result is particularly meaningful. But as Election Day approaches, early voting will improve on the final outcome, he said, than polls. In 2016 and 2020, when polls showed Democrats winning in North Carolina, McDonald's analysis of early voting totals told him (correctly) that the polls were wrong. Analyzing voting data, he says, is similar to the way pollsters model the electorate when they create their surveys, looking at past voting patterns and making adjustments based on early voting demographics and taking into account changes in state election laws . “That's all information you want to absorb, and in many cases it's more of a real signal than what most surveys say.”

McDonald said he would have to wait until early voting ends the weekend before Election Day to get a clearer picture of the state of the race, but for now, “it's been a good time of early voting for Republicans,” citing North Carolina and Florida in particular. “That doesn't mean Trump will win – but they're doing better than they were at the start of the early voting period. “If things stay the course, we'll have another very close election.”

Sophisticated campaigns use early voting data to figure out which of their reliable voters haven't shown up yet. Democrats have an “accessibility score” of 0 to 100 for every voter in a battleground state, and until their target voters mail in their ballots, the Harris campaign will bombard them with targeted digital ads, mailers and door knockers until they do. On the Republican side, the field operation was largely handed over to two SuperPACs, one led by Elon Musk and the other led by conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. It's an unusual arrangement, but Republicans involved in the effort say the high number of early votes shows that critics were wrong to doubt it. “We met all of our metrics and exceeded all of our goals for door knocking and mail,” a Republican official said. “It’s still early and we still have a long way to go, but so far the Republicans are doing better and the Democrats are doing worse.”

Republicans not affiliated with the outside GOTV effort, however, aren't so sure. “I just can’t help but feel like Harris has a better operation than we do,” said a Georgia Republican political operative. “Just look at what they do. Harris and Walz seem more focused on going beyond the base and getting all of this stuff done here with Liz Cheney and whoever. It seems like they’re in persuasion mode and smart enough to know what to do right now.”

In the meantime, poor Anzelone just wishes everyone would stop. We'll find out who won soon enough, and poring over the early voting numbers to guess at hidden meanings isn't helpful.

“As a mildly depressed middle-aged man, I have enough anxiety to deal with, even though I haven't heard about early voting or voter surveys or anything like that,” he said. “Are you upset about the early voting numbers? I doubt it. What I would do is put that fear aside and move on with the day. This is advice based on years of experience looking at early voting data and turning out it doesn't mean anything. Quote-end quote.”