The surge
The tricky part about early voting data is that you have to know how to parse it correctly – and most people don’t. You can’t simply look at the raw numbers of Democrats vs Republicans who are voting early, because those numbers end up being mostly happenstance. If you want to truly learn anything, you have to look at the specific demographics who are voting early.
To that end, over the past week we’ve finally started seeing some truly meaningful early voting data – and as best it can be parsed, most or all of it appears to be good news for Kamala Harris. Women are outvoting men by an even bigger margin than they did in 2020. In Pennsylvania there’s a surge of women voting early who have never voted before. There have been recent surges among Black voters in Georgia, and among young voters in Michigan and Wisconsin. Given that these demographics all tend to lean strongly Democratic, this is all seemingly good news for Kamala.
If you’re going to look at early voting data at all, these are the kinds of things you want to look at. It’s best to ignore anyone who simply quotes total early voting numbers by party and tries to claim any insight into those totals. But really, there’s not a ton of reason to look at the data at all at this late date. The only “data” that matters is how many more people you (yes, you) can help get to the polls over these final couple of days. Let’s do this!
