I jest, a bit, in the title. As I’ve told you several times, friends don’t let friends watch the early vote. But there’s one thing I want to point your attention to. I’ll explain in a moment why this leaves me mainly consistent.
There’s one thing that seems to be showing up fairly consistently across the country and particularly in the Deep South. That is a high proportion of generally younger, non-regular Democratic voters. And they tend to be less white, relative to the rest of the electorate. In a number of Deep South states you’re seeing high turnout for non-regular Democratic voters which in states like Mississippi for instance means mostly Black voters.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times, the problem with watching the early vote is that you’re trying to figure out a candidate’s percentage of the pie before you know the size of the pie. Maybe one party is doing great in the early vote but they’re really just cannibalizing their Election Day vote so it’s meaningless. The sharper people who analyze these things are operating at a much higher level of sophistication than this illustration suggests; but the same fundamental problem applies. What’s different here is that you’re talking about a group of voters who aren’t usually part of the pie at all. So you can draw some different inferences. Needless to say, these people could be matched by a bunch of non-regular Republican voters on Election Day. But there’s accumulating evidence that points against that.
To be clear, something like what I’m describing above is what you’d expect to see in a strong wave election. So this isn’t “wow, it’s even bigger than we thought.” This is just an indicator that would be broadly consistent with a big wave — nothing you can be sure of and in itself it’s a relatively small slice of the electorate. Just keep it in mind.
The other thing is that we’re starting to see signs that Callais (the decision which effectively killed the Voting Rights Act) is spiking Black turnout in the states where Republicans most aggressively moved to disenfranchise Black voters. This overlaps with the point I made above since by definition, higher than usual turnout means non-regular voters showing up. The biggest pool of non-regular voters are younger voters. I note this in large part because I’m seeing Republican pollsters worrying about it too.
As I’ve said previously, don’t take this as confirming anything is going to happen when the votes are counted. It’s more that if Democrats have a strong night, these details about the shape of the electorate will probably be key parts of that outcome.
