The real early voting story in Pennsylvania
Early voting data is increasingly vital when it comes to figuring out what’s going on in an election. But it’s a new science that a whole lot of pundits are getting very wrong. Some of them don’t appear to understand how to parse the data. Other pundits seem to be spinning the data wrong on purpose for attention, figuring that most of the public won’t know any better.
I recently wrote that Kamala Harris 2024 campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon is one of the best at parsing voting data – a reminder that the people who are truly good at this kind of thing are working in politics, not working the sidelines as pundits. Jen recently pointed out that most of the Republicans voting early are people who were always going to vote at some point, while many of the Democrats voting early are people who don’t normally vote. In other words, the Republican early voting numbers are not impressive regardless of their number, while the Democratic early voting numbers are impressive regardless of their number.
This is why so many self proclaimed early voting data analysts are getting it so wrong. You can’t just look at the size of the 2024 numbers, compare them to the size of the 2020 numbers, and call it a day. That’s a good way to come up with simplistic gibberish. Yet earlier this week there were reports that the Trump campaign was doing precisely this kind of simplistic gibberish analysis, and was thrilled at how “great” it was going – when in reality the early voting data looks pretty bad for Trump.
Now we’re getting some more context about those early votes. For instance, about one-third of the early votes in Pennsylvania are Democratic women who didn’t vote last time. And if you look at the data across all swing states, women are early voting in much larger numbers than men. It’s also being separately reported that Trump is way behind in senior citizen early voting in Pennsylvania, and that Trump’s campaign people are now finally figuring out that they’re in trouble in the state.
This all goes back to what Kamala’s campaign manager has been saying about the early vote. Trump is merely getting the votes that everyone knew he was going to get anyway. But Kamala is getting a whole lot of votes from people who weren’t being counted on to vote. In the end both candidates are going to get all the voters that they were expecting to get. But Kamala is on track to get a lot more votes than that, while Trump is on track to only get the votes everyone was expecting.
It’s not difficult to figure out why this is good news for Kamala Harris. It’s also not difficult to figure out why Donald Trump is now out there claiming that “Pennsylvania is rigged” against him. His campaign people clearly think he’s going to lose the state, and they’re covering their backsides by feeding a senile Trump a bunch of conspiracy theories about how it’s being stolen from him.
Of course none of this means we’ve won. The early voting data so far is in our favor, but we can’t just idly assume it’ll hold up. Trump’s campaign people think they’re going to lose, but that doesn’t mean they’re correct. It matters less what the data says, and it matters more that we each go out and get Kamala some more votes down the stretch. But if you’re going to pay any credence to early voting data at all, you should know that it’s looking favorable for Kamala.
