How To Analyze the Early Vote

I told you a week or more ago not to try to interpret early voting data yourself. And don’t put much stock in a hot take on it you see from someone on Twitter. It’s a fool’s errand. If you have access to a lot of data you can draw inferences. That can be real-time modeling data the campaigns have access to or it can be various other datasets that provide context for interpreting the data. Even with all that, the hallmark of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is a lot of tentativeness and uncertainty. With a lot of knowledge you can point to patterns or a tightened ranges of possibilities, not certainties.

I’m doing this post both because the findings are interesting but also because it’s an illustration of how you can actually pull some signals out of the data when you really know your stuff.