Early mail-in voting raises questions about possible election results

The first votes for the 2024 presidential election are pouring in, raising questions about what can be gleaned from the data when predicting the possible outcome of the race.

Nearly all states and Washington DC have started voting by mail or early in-person elections and releasing information on the number of returned ballots, the first actual data from the race itself. States announce how many ballots they have received, allowing comparisons with previous elections, and many of them also share how many members of each party cast ballots.

But some experts caution against extrapolating too much from the data, given the several unknown variables and unique nature of the last presidential election.

“It’s fair to make some observations, but it’s too early to draw any conclusions,” said Scott Tranter, director of data science at Decision Desk HQ.

Voting by mail and absentee is one regular feature of presidential races dating back to the Civil War, but the practice has grown in more recent elections of the 21st century. And Democrats are naturally more likely to vote early, while Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day.

The gap was particularly outspoken in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 60 percent of voters for President Biden voted by mail or absentee, compared to about 30 percent of voters for former President Trump, according to Pew Research Center.

But so far, data released in the key swing states likely to determine the 2024 election has shown a big increase in the number of Republicans voting by mail or in person.

Some caveats to analyzing this data include that the basics of every election are different, and even party breakdowns don’t automatically show how people voted, hiding the possibility of cross-party voting.

Among swing states, Republicans submitted more ballots in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, while Democrats submitted more in Pennsylvania. according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. Party breakdown data is not available in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Nevada has received some attention due to the advantage Republicans have so far in votes already cast, as the state is an all-mail voting state, meaning all voters will receive a mail-in ballot if they choose to do so method to use.

Jon Ralston, an expert on Nevada politics and editor of The Nevada Independent, tracks daily vote counts in the Silver State. With Republicans submitting more ballots than Democrats for the first time since at least 2008, he said earlier this month that the totals could indicate “serious danger” for Democrats in the state.

But pollster Nate Silver said Ralston is the only one whose analysis has more content than “noise,” and experts say observers should be wary when comparing this election to previous ones.

Ken Miller, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the public may be putting too much stock in Republican improvements in early voting and mail-in voting, at least because of a shift in how at which Republican Party leaders have spoken. about the method, especially Trump.

Trump denounced mail-in voting for much of the 2020 cycle as being prone to fraud, and encouraged his voters to cast their ballots on Election Day. He continued to insist that he wanted to institute one-day voting, and to some extent he has said he still supports it this year.

But Trump and his allies have one joint pressure to improve the GOP’s performance in mail-in voting without abandoning his false claims of voter fraud that cost him the 2020 election. The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s “Swamp the Vote” initiative has called on Republicans to overwhelm Democrats on the rise through mail-in and early voting.

The effort appears to have had at least some effect, given the tighter margins so far.

“The last presidential election we had a presidential candidate who encouraged his supporters not to vote early, not to vote by mail and to vote on Election Day,” Miller said. “That’s quite unusual. And so now we’ve returned to some sort of normal, but we’ve returned to a normal that voters are much more accustomed to (early voting).

“Any comparison people make to this election (and) 2020 will miss an important part of the story that Republicans should of course have increased their early turnout,” he continued.

But questions remain about whether the change is more a result of this shift in mindset about early voting among Republicans or a sign of charged enthusiasm from Republicans.

Tranter said both theories make sense because some data points support them both. He said data shows some new voters from both parties are voting early, especially in Pennsylvania, but that Democrats have also shown enthusiasm among their base and shown signs of improvement among white voters, who sometimes tend to vote on Election Day to vote.

He said the number of new voters is measurable but not “off the charts.”

“There are good data points that support both sides,” Tranter said.

But some said the data could offer signs of what will happen next week.

John Couvillon, a pollster and analyst who tracks early voting data, said the results could be a “blinking” sign for Democrats as their decline in mail-in voting compared to Republicans is not “facing an equal and opposite increase” in the number of votes by mail. early personal mood.

He said the level of decline for Democrats compared to the 2020 race, an election with historically high turnout, indicates a lack of enthusiasm.

“Why there is some statistical significance in seeing a big drop in early voting is that you can’t just assume that they’re all going to show up on Election Day,” Couvillon said. “Most will, of course, but not all.”

Of course, questions remain about the feasibility of comparing this year to 2020, when the pandemic created an unusual political climate.

“What’s good is to compare it to a baseline, but we can’t compare it to 2020. With COVID it was completely skewed,” said Karl Rove on Fox News about last week’s early voting numbers.

Tranter said Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s forecasting model doesn’t take into account early voting data because of the fluctuations in what comes in, making it difficult to use.

“The main reason it’s difficult to use early voting trends is that you very rarely make an apples-to-apples comparison,” he said.

In the absence of definitive conclusions, analysts say a wait-and-see approach is best.

“My advice would be exactly the same as for all polls in the United States: They are just very murky snapshots,” Miller said. “And look, in just over a week we’ll know.”

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