The numbers are “encouraging”
With the midterm polling averages now flooded by Republican-commissioned polls, we’re left looking for other ways to evaluate how things are shaping up in these final few days of the election cycle. That said, people are already voting, and in fact a large percentage of the total vote is already in. So what are these numbers telling us?
The catch is that while early voting data is made public, tallies are based on party registration, not based on how each early voter has actually voted. But even that data can be made useful in the right hands.
That’s why the work being done over at TargetSmart is so interesting. Their number crunching suggests that the Democrats have a bigger lead in early voting in a dozen key states than they did at this point in the 2018 midterms. Those leads range anywhere from 0.2 points to 22 points. This suggests that Democratic early voting enthusiasm is varying greatly across the nation, but it’s varying from good to very good.
Political analyst Simon Rosenberg is pairing this data with the fact that so many Democratic candidates are getting results than what Biden was getting at this stage in 2022, and he’s come to the conclusion that “what you are seeing is a pattern of Dem overperformance” in 2022.
This is crucial, because coming in to the 2022 midterms, historical factors such as having a new incumbent Democratic President had set the stage for a Republican midterm sweep. But with so many factors going the other way, from Roe v. Wade, to Trump saddling the Republicans with unpopular candidates, to democracy being on the line, the Democrats have a real chance to win the midterms – but if the Democrats do win, it’ll likely be very close.
In other words, the Democrats need the pattern of overperformance that they’re seeing. They need that pattern to continue. One key reason for that overperformance thus far is that so many of you have rolled up your sleeves, signed up to phone bank or go door to door, and help get out the vote. We need to keep putting in that work right up until the final day of this election cycle, so we can win what will end up being a very close battle. Now let’s go win this!
