Who is voting? Who is winning? Early data offers only some clues
As early voting breaks records across the U.S., political analysts and campaigns are reviewing reams of data on the voters, looking for clues to key questions: Who is voting? And who is winning?
On one level, the answers can be simple. Registered Democrats are outpacing registered Republicans significantly — by 14 percentage points — in states that are reporting voters’ party affiliation, according to an Associated Press analysis of the early vote.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Many Americans’ choices don’t align with their party registration. Meanwhile, polls show Republicans have heeded President Donald Trump’s baseless warnings about mail voting, and large numbers intend to vote on Election Day. That means the early Democratic surge could give way to a Republican surge Tuesday.
The picture is further clouded by the unprecedented nature of how Americans are voting. While Democrats are hungry for signs that key parts of their coalition — young voters, Black voters, new voters — are engaged, comparisons to 2016 are difficult.
Here’s a closer look at what we know — and don’t know — about early voters:
More than halfway home
As of Friday afternoon, 86.8 million people had voted in the presidential election. That’s 63 percent of the total who cast ballots in the 2016 race. Most election experts think the U.S. will see 150 million to 160 million ballots cast in 2020, which would mean that we are likely more than halfway through voting. In Texas, more votes have already been cast than in all of 2016.
Democrats have a big lead in the early vote over the GOP — 47 percent to 33 percent — according
to the AP analysis of data from political data company L2.
That doesn’t mean Democrats are going to win. But it does increase the pressure on Republicans to have a similar advantage — or higher — on Election Day.
New voters
The big turnout question in all elections is: Which side is bringing in new voters? The data shows Democrats are accomplishing that — but not necessarily as dramatically as some of the big overall numbers might suggest.
More than 1 in 4 of all ballots — 27 percent — were cast either by new or infrequent voters, according to AP’s analysis. Those are voters who have never voted before or voted in fewer than half the elections in which they were eligible.
A rise in that number appears to be good news for Democrats. Forty-three percent of the infrequent and new voters are registered Democrats, compared with a quarter who are Republicans.
“Democrats are already ex
panding their electorate,” said Tom Bonier of Democratic data company TargetSmart. “That would certainly appear to be favorable for Biden — to be taken with the caveat we’ve heard a million times before, that we don’t know how many other voters will come out on Election Day.”
Black voters
Joe Biden’s fate may be tied to strong turnout among Black voters in the battleground states. So far, about 9 percent of the early vote has been cast by African Americans, about on par with the 10 percent of the electorate Black voters made up in 2016, according to a Pew Research estimate of voters in that election.
Organizers say Black voters are reeling from the pandemic and economic collapse, which have hit African Americans hardest, and the country’s racial reckoning. That’s motivating them to overcome persistent obstacles to voting, said Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International
Union.
“Black and brown communities have faced these multiple crises,” Henry said. That’s stiffened their resolve to vote, she added.
Battlegrounds
The Trump campaign predicts that when all the votes are counted, the turnout rate in battleground states in 2020 will be similar to that of 2016.
“It is pretty predictable what they’ve brought into the electorate,” Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy, said of Democrats. “We will bring our own new voters into the electorate ourselves, and it will all come out in the washing machine.”
That’s a sharp break from several election experts.
John Couvillon, a Republican pollster who tracks the early vote, said the Trump campaign is being too dismissive. “I heard the same kind of attitude in 2008, when Republicans were in denial about the impressive early vote turnout Obama was generating,” he said.