Something’s brewing

With three weeks to go in this election, it’s not always clear what we should be looking at. Kamala Harris, her campaign, her party, and her surrogates are all functioning as well as one could hope. Donald Trump is fully unraveling in a dementia addled haze. But I’m not sure either of those things is the story. The story right now is that people are voting already, and there’s hard data coming in about those votes.

By now we know that we have to kind of ignore the polls down the stretch, both because this is the timeframe where Republicans start flooding the polling averages with junk polls. There’s also a new phenomenon in this era where a whole lot of people are voting early, in which even the legitimate polls start to get a bit wacky once people start voting. Why? No one knows.

But since people are indeed voting, we have a different kind of data to look at. Early voting data is tricky to interpret, for a few reasons. For one thing, different states release different kinds of data. Some states tell us who’s voting early based on party registration, which doesn’t account for voters who are crossing party lines. We also haven’t gone through enough election cycles yet in the early voting era, so the expertise is still being figured out, even among experts.

That said, there are emerging early voting experts like Tom Bonier and Simon Rosenberg, who are getting pretty good at figuring out what the data means and putting it within the context of other early voting era elections like 2020 and 2022.

For instance Bonier recently pointed out that in Pennsylvania, the Democrats have already gotten 16.2% of the votes in 2024 that they got in all of 2020, whereas the Republicans have only gotten 14.8% of the votes in 2024 that they got in all of 2020. That’s potentially confusing, but what it means is that the Democrats appear to be doing better so far in 2024 in Pennsylvania than they did in 2020 – which is a good sign given that they won Pennsylvania in 2020.

There are other interesting data points in other key swing states. For instance in Michigan, women are outvoting men thus far in 2024 by a bigger margin than in 2020. Given that women voters lean more Democrat than men voters do, this is a good sign for Kamala Harris. Of course what it really means is that a lot more women than men are voting early in the state, which doesn’t tell us what the gender gap will look like among later voters and same-day voters.

But the early voting data, to the extent that it can be parsed, and to the extent that it matters, sure does seem to be good news for Kamala Harris.

Then there’s Georgia, where voting began yesterday, and immediately saw record breaking numbers. For all we know these numbers might be record breaking for both parties. But given that more Democrats than Republicans tend to vote early, this is yet another data point that is seemingly good news for Kamala Harris.

The bottom line is that something is brewing here. We’re seeing record setting early voter turnout overall, and we’re seeing record setting numbers in particular among women voters and among Black voters. For the past few months this election has felt like a movement. Now that voting is underway, that “movement” is indeed moving. The other side will get plenty of votes too, so we have to keep working hard these final three weeks. But it now feels like we have the upper hand. We just have to see it through.