Earlier this month I wrote a piece entitled Friends Don’t Let Friends Watch the Early Vote. I wanted to re-up that recommendation, notwithstanding the fact that I have kept an eye on these findings, as I always do. The simple fact is that all of these efforts amount to figuring out how big a share of the pie you have before you know how big the pie is. That doesn’t mean you can’t glean anything by analyzing these things or that the knowledgable people doing it are silly or mendacious. They’re not. It’s just that you can’t draw any firm conclusions from it and our desire to see what we want in these entrails greatly outweighs the hints we can get from them. As I noted before, this is especially the case because the partisan dynamics of who votes early, in person, by mail, on Election Day, etc., is in so much flux.
There is one possible exception to this and that’s Nevada. That’s because you have one super knowledgable guy, Jon Ralston, and his team at the Nevada Independent. And Nevada has much less multidimensionality than other states — a heavily Democratic, urban and unionized electorate voting early versus a very different rural and conservative one voting late. By looking at the early voting, this lack of multidimensionality allows you to figure whether the other side might or might not be able to catch up. This makes some level of approximation more manageable, though I think flux in partisan voting patterns must apply there too.
The one thing I’ve seen that seems probative is that a lot of states seem to show Democrats doing better with low propensity voters who are generally young and less white than the rest of the electorate. In a lot of cases, “low propensity” means people who didn’t vote in 2024 or didn’t vote in 2 of the 3 most recent elections. If that turns out to be the case, it would be the reverse of what happened in 2024. But being “low propensity” probably means they’re not the same people. This seems possibly probative since this would mean Democrats bringing more new voters out in a cycle in which we would expect lower voter turnout that should favor Democrats. (Democrats now have the more habitual voters.)
All this said, it all remains figuring out your percentage of the pie before you know the size of the pie. So I would recommend avoiding it, unless you have a very disciplined mind and can confidently say to yourself: I’m going to give this a look because it’s interesting and I’m confident I won’t forget that I have no idea what it means.
