Election day is a week away WHO early voting is gaining attention. NBC News’ tracker of early voting ballots is one of the few data available statewide about who has already cast ballots — surprising hard numbers after a poll-filled campaign that suggests a close race, but nothing more definitive.
But while early voting is a useful tool for understanding what’s happened so far, given that we know when different types of people are likely to vote, it’s easy to read more than is warranted into these patterns and what they mean for the 2024 election. vote. In particular, we know that young people wait disproportionately until election day to vote early.
Our takeaway: Even with weeks of early voting already over in some places and only days to go, it’s still dangerous to read too much into partisan differences about who has voted so far. There’s still time for those patterns to change — and we’ve seen them shift around the bends in early voting in recent weeks.
NBC News about 10 days ago examined some early examples In Virginia early voting, as a share of total turnout from 2020, voters in areas of the state that support Republican candidates generally cast more votes than parts of the state that support Democratic candidates.
Because we hypothesized that these differences could reduce Virginia once more satellite polling stations opened, we thought it was too early to conclude that Republican-educated districts tended to have higher turnout than Democratic-educated districts based on these patterns. In line with this assumption, the following table of early voting through October 26 shows significant levels of early voting use across different areas.
However, it is still the case that significantly more ballots are cast in areas that generally lean Republican than in other parts of the state.
Although most of the satellite polls are now open, these patterns are not clear evidence that overall turnout will be higher in Republican-leaning areas than in the rest of the state.
Still, one reason to be cautious is that voting times can vary from state to state.
Previous research shows that older and more experienced voters disproportionately cast absentee ballots well in advance of polling day, while younger and less experienced voters wait until closer to polling day to cast their ballots. Thus, we expect precincts with higher numbers of older voters who regularly turn out to cast absentee ballots more quickly than precincts with lower numbers of younger voters who turn out less frequently.
That’s certainly true in Virginia right now: according to NBC News Virginia ballot tracker returnsapproximately 44% of ballots cast to date have been cast by people over 65, and only 16% by people under 40. In contrast, TargetSmart’s voter file for the 2020 election shows that 30% of voters were under 40 and 24% were over 65.
Voting operations active in an area also play a role in determining when people will vote. For example, an experience During the 2020 election, it showed that people returned their postal ballots more quickly when they were randomly assigned to be sent an informational postcard about the postal voting process, even though the postcard did not mention the time.
Given that young voters are disproportionately Democratic and older voters disproportionately Republican, there is reason to expect that, all other things being equal, precincts that tend to support Democrats will see more ballots cast before Election Day. Support Republicans. Here’s what happened in Virginia’s 2022 general election: The most Democratic-leaning parts of the state returned about 57% of absentee ballots within 10 days of the election, while the Republican-leaning parts of the state returned only 40%. their ballots in this latest extended time frame.
Will absentee voting in Virginia follow similar patterns in 2024 as it did in 2022? It’s really hard to say. One of the broader problems with interpreting early voting results in most states is that there is not enough historical data to compare current returns.
Because 2020 has led to greater use of absentee voting in many states, we do not believe that data on the timing of absentee voting prior to 2020 are necessarily indicative of the patterns we expect to observe now. And since more ballots were mailed in 2020 than will be mailed this time around, we don’t think it’s wise to make a year-over-year comparison.
In some states, benchmarking through 2022 is an option, but there are still reasons to suspect that people may vote at different times during presidential elections than during midterm elections. So while we expect more ballots to be cast in Democratic than Republican districts in Virginia over the next 10 days, we don’t think we have enough information to say exactly how many.
Another reason why we should not conclude that there is disproportionate turnout in Republican-leaning areas comes from looking at the voting history of people who have already voted in Virginia. The chart below shows the number of recent elections in which Virginia early voters participated this year. As previous research has shown, the vast majority of ballots cast so far have been cast by consistent voters.
If a region experiences higher than normal turnout, we would expect a greater number of less consistent voters to turn out. But if anything, the table below shows that people who vote in Republican-leaning areas are more consistent voters in Virginia than the average outsider has ever been.
These patterns in Virginia have implications for how you should think about early voting data reported in any state.
In particular, he said, you should be very careful about how you interpret any partisan breakdowns of early voting reported by NBC News. absentee ballot tracker or any other viewer. In particular, you should consider the possibility that absentee voters from one party may be overrepresented on current returned ballots compared to what the final results would show due to differences in absentee voting.
This is especially true in battleground states, where campaign activity takes shape when people vote.
While it may be useful to compare the state’s patterns this year with historical indicators of when votes were cast in the state in 2022, there is no guarantee that these return patterns will be similar across election cycles.
Finally, we must remember that the vote counts the same whether on the first day of early voting or when the polls close on polling day. So we have to be careful not to take too much before all the ballots are cast.