According to New Policy Institute founder and Democratic activist Simon Rosenberg (relying on the TargetSmart analysis) the overall turnout in early vote is ahead of 2018 and Democrats lead in share of voters 50-39. This is an eleven-point advantage, which translates into a 3.2 million vote lead. Democrats trailed Republicans at this point in the 2018 midterms. In fact, the Democratic share of the early vote is ahead of the 2020 share in the following states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, new Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
NBC News has different figures, but a similar story (see below for why the figures are not the same). Democrats have a smaller lead with a 46% share, but Republican’s share is also lower at 35%. Independents make up the rest. Women make up 53% of early voters compared to 45% for men (with 2% unknown). The figures in the states show a Democratic advantage in most battleground states.
So, what does this tell us?
The early vote data suggests we are not going to see a Republican wave election. Depending on what happens on Election Day itself, the data suggests the Democrats could outperform expectations. But, they could also do that and lose one or both houses of Congress. This looks to be a close election, both in individual races and for control of Congress. The early vote (that is, early in-person plus mail voting) thus far suggests Democrats are off to a good start, but we have to be careful about making predictions based on this data. There are a few things to remember about the early vote data.
First, one’s party affiliation does not mean they will vote with their party’s candidates. So, while a large turnout of Democrats will likely benefit Democratic candidates, it is possible that large portions of that electorate will vote Republican – or at least enough to allow Republicans to win. Second, we can say the same thing about demographic data. A large turnout among women does not mean that Democrats will win.
Third, party registration data is not available in every state and must be modeled. Some states do not allow for party registration at all and others don’t report their early voting data that way. So, the share of Democratic vote in those states – and partially nationwide – is an estimation of the share. TargetSmart has a proprietary method it uses to model this by looking at a wide range of information about voters. It is not clear to me how media outfits such as NBC News do this, but the difference in the numbers between TargetSmart and NBC News are almost certainly related to how they differently estimate party affiliation where it is not available.
Fourth, we don’t know how many people are going to show up on Election Day to vote in person. All votes are counted the same; an early in-person vote, a mail-in vote, and an in-person Election Day vote are equal. If a large share of voters turn out on Election Day, the early vote share of the overall vote will be diluted so that the impact the early vote appeared to have on the results could be overstated.
There is only a finite number of registered voters in this country. Getting an exact number of registered voters at any given moment in time is challenging, but the 2020 US Census estimated that there were 168.3 million. About 30 million people have already voted by the time this post was published, which means there are a lot of outstanding potential votes. In the last midterm election (2018), over 122 million people voted, 34% of whom voted early. Turnout is expected to exceed 2018, but probably not 2020 (which was a presidential election). The percentage of people voting early this year is expected to be over 40%. Fewer people are voting absentee or by mail this year, but the early vote share is expected to be larger than past elections because more people are voting early in-person this year.1
Considering all of the noise they have made about mail voting, you may be forgiven for thinking that there was a Republican backlash against it (or early voting in general) in 2018.2 There was not. That did not happen until 2020 and was driven by Trump’s plan to discredit the results of an election he knew he was going to lose. The contrived Republican hysteria over mail and early in-person voting continues, but we don’t know what impact it will have yet. We can see from the early voting data that Democrats have improved their early vote share over 2018, but plenty of Republicans and Independents are voting early as well.
It does look like the election will be decided on Election Day, but that does not mean that Republicans will win. Democrats appear to be banking a lot of votes right now, but a lot of Democrats also appear to be planning to vote on the 8th. The early vote numbers do not tell us that the Democrats are going to win, but they do suggest one thing: it is unlikely there is a Republican wave this year. When you combine this with the Republican effort to game the polling averages with suspiciously non-transparent polls, the increasingly unhinged campaign ads, and spending in places that they should have shored up by now, it appears the Republicans don’t believe they are winning either (or at least that they are concerned about it).
There was also less of a desire to vote by mail since the COVID pandemic did not strike until early 2020.