This doesn’t significantly change the picture from what I noted before. But something I at least hadn’t figured on is showing up in the numbers. There’s a significant difference between the breakdown of the primary day and the early/mail vote. The gist is that the primary day vote is significantly better for “uncommitted” and the early/mail vote better for Biden. The net effect of this is that Biden seems to be adding to his margins now since the primary day vote was in most cases getting counted first. So for instance, Dearborn (which is the heart of the state’s Arab-American community) had been like 75% for uncommitted. But now it’s at roughly 55% to 41% as the early votes get counted.
This doesn’t dramatically change the picture. But it seems like uncommitted may now end up a couple points lower than it seemed an hour or so ago.
A separate question is why there would be such a stark difference. We’re used to seeing this split in partisan terms. But why amongst Democrats? I have a few theories. But they’re just that.
My read of the overall contest is that there was a lot of coverage of an anti-Biden protest vote. That spurred what amounts to a normie-Dem driven counter-protest. That’s what gets you such an overall high turnout. The normies I would guess are more consistent voting Democrats who tend to be higher educated and more affluent. Those folks do a lot of voting by mail and early voting in all elections. The uncommitted meanwhile seems heavily centered in the college towns and perhaps in less consistently voting immigrant communities. It seems plausible that those were more primary day voting groups. Again, this last point is informed speculation.
