The Real Early Voting Story : Disappearing Democrats

While reading any absentee / mail / early voting data is fraught, there is a pattern emerging that could end up being very important. There are “disappearing Democrats” that we would’ve expected to vote based on 2020/2022 trends that are not currently voting early.

Now maybe these people are going to vote on Election Day and EV will be a bit of a “red mirage” and the blueing of Election Day will solve this problem, but history says that’s an unlikely outcome.

Pennsylvania

If we look at those who returned ballots in 2020 and 2022 but have not yet requested them this year we see about 1.2M voters from 2020 and about 224k from 2022. These voters are overwhelmingly Democrats. Now it may be fair to assume that these folks vote on Election Day in huge numbers BUT even a small drop off is a problem for Democrats. Consider if the whole 1.2M voter universe has a 10% drop off. That reduces the GOP by 29k votes but it reduces Democrats by 74k. That’s a 50k drop off and cut 0.7 points off Kamala’s numbers without any additional persuasion which is almost HALF the Biden margin in PA in 2020.

What’s more interesting if we break out the audience based on their vote history we can see there’s a big chunk of low turnout Dems sitting on the table. In fact if we model out these people and their expected liekliehood to turnout these ‘missing’ 742k voters likely mean about 110k less Dem voters on Election Day, while the GOP drop off is only 45k.

Nevada

The always entertaining and incredibly experienced Jon Ralston is out with his early voting blog which is the gospel for EV watchers in Nevada and the same phenomenon is playing out. Ralston points out that the Dem vote total is coming down as registration has also gone down.

Also an astounding stat that same day registration is going heavily in the GOP favor with GOP picking up 500+ votes a day. (HT to Jeremy Hughes).

The Democrats are disappearing from early vote in NV and Democrats will likely need a blue Election Day in order to win in the state.

North Carolina

North Carolina also shows a similar pattern with Democrats having 13% more drop off voters than the GOP when looking at 2020 and an even starker 16% more disappearing Democrats from 2022.

Now there’s still a lot more days to go and Election Day so obviously possible that these folks show up and Democrats close the gap but that will require a fairly blue Election Day that we’ve never seen before historically.

Georgia

Different state same story with a 7 point gap here on these missing voters. This again is notable in these close races because now Democrats need to do something they have not done since before Covid which is to muster a blue late early voting or Election Day push.

Don’t Overreact

So the thing here is we don’t know what the future will hold and we are looking at very early data and then extrapolating a lot. It could be wrong. Maybe Democrats will show up in droves late in a big break from the last 3 election cycles, but no doubt this is NOT what the Harris camp or national Democrats want to see.

Thanks to Ryan Bonifay for a lot of the data work behind this.