Various strains of speculation erupted post-Comey on Friday. Besides the incessant debates over the FBI director’s motives, or the nature of the investigation, election-minded folks immediately wondered about the fallout at the ballot box. Would blood in the water (real or imaginary) drive Republican voters into an anti-Hillary feeding frenzy? Would seeing the Democratic nominee again hounded by a scandal (real or imaginary) depress Democratic turnout?
The penultimate weekend of early voting has since come and gone, and while early voting statistics are but one indicator in answering these questions, the answer for now appears to be that little has changed from where we stood before Friday’s bombshell. As tallies from the weekend in-person early voting began to trickle in, we’ve seen better-than-expected news in some places for Democrats, and worse-than-expected news for Democrats in others. Anyone who was looking for a clear trajectory was left wanting.
OHIO & IOWA
We’re packing up these two states because, thus far in the early voting period, they’ve been frequently cited as the most pessimistic for Democrats, and polling has shown them to be the Obama states in the greatest peril of turning red.
Both states, however, have shown some signs of life.
This is particularly true in Ohio, where TargetSmart head Tom Bonier, who has been following the state closely, noted that the Democrats have had a surge of early voters that have made up virtually all of what had been a sizable deficit from 2012 in two key Democratic counties: Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Franklin (Columbus). He notes that Franklin is now just 0.9 percent behind 2012 pace (it was over 6 percent back 10 days ago), and Cuyahoga is just 1.9 percent behind 2012 pace.
What makes this movement in Ohio relevant to our lede today is that this surge happened this weekend. Bonier, tongue-in-cheek, gave this turnout information the hashtag #comeyeffect. While there isn’t widespread evidence elsewhere of a turnout surge based off the Friday story, it does certainly buttress the point that there does not appear to be a turnout lag as a result.
Meanwhile, in the Hawkeye State, progress is a bit slower, but still palpable. While Democrats had lagged severely in their pace of return of ballots vis-a-vis 2012, they have made up significant ground, according to early voting expert Michael McDonald. Once down almost 40,000 ballots off of 2012 pace, the Democrats are now down closer to 25,000 votes back. What’s more, they have made up more ground than the GOP has (based, again, off 2012 performance), so what was once a yawning gap between the two parties on that metric (over 20,000 ballots) has been cut pretty significantly.
Also worth noting: One thing we have long wrestled with in early voting is determining the worth of drawing conclusions based on ballots returned. After all, in virtually all of these cases, neither party has more than a plurality, and independent voters hold the balance. However, national polling this weekend from Ipsos/Reuters notes that Hillary Clinton has a solid lead among those who voted early. That tells us, in all probability, that registered independents are probably splitting no worse than evenly.
We still have eight days to go, but the early signs are that the basic dynamics of this presidential race have changed little, if at all, based on the bomb lobbed into the middle of the proceedings by the FBI director. Whether that stability holds for the rest of the week, and through Election Day, remains to be seen.
FLORIDA
On Saturday, the narrative of depressed Democrats/energized Republicans seemed plausible, given the in-person early vote turnout. Despite Democrats typically doing very well in weekend in-person early voting, the GOP only barely lost the in-person vote for Saturday, a tiny deficit they offset with a pronounced edge in mail-in voting. In all, the Republicans actually edged out to a 23,000 net advantage in ballots returns since the very start of all early voting (both in-person and by mail), a gain of around 2,000 over the previous day.
Democratic hopes, undoubtedly, hinged on an appearance by the nominee in-state on Sunday, as well as the first round of “Souls to the Polls” events centering on Florida’s African American churches. When Florida updated their ballot counts early Monday morning, the Democrats emerged as the Sunday victor, though the final margins still left Republicans ahead. The Democrats won the weekend, but it was a modest victory, one where the GOP overall edge was cut from that 23,000-ballot edge to around 8,500. The bottom line was that the Democrats ended week one of in-person early voting with only a 3.1 percent advantage over the GOP, which is a far cry from the 10.2 percent edge that they enjoyed in 2012.
However, it is worth noting that at least part of that fade can be owed to two factors. For one thing, the Democratic registration advantage in 2016 is considerably smaller (around 200,000) than it was four years ago. For another, the Democrats are performing comparably better in mail-in voting. In fact, if one counts ballots that have been issued and not returned, the GOP actually trails in the net number of mail-in ballots. In 2012, the GOP had an edge of nearly 80,000 ballots in the mail-in voting.
So, while the in-person early vote was a tad underwhelming for Democrats, this cannot be emphasized enough: It was not demonstrably worse or better than it had been all week, including prior to Friday’s events.
NEVADA
Nevada, meanwhile, offers the best argument that things have changed little as a result of the FBI story. The in-person early vote in the Silver State has followed the same trajectory since it began over a week ago, with the Democratic performance looking quite similar to (in fact, in some ways, uncannily so) their performance in 2012.
The Democrats padded their margin in populous Clark County this weekend, despite the fact that Donald Trump was campaigning in southern Nevada on Sunday. By the close of the weekend, the Democrats enjoyed a lead of 47,000 total ballots cast in Clark, home to Las Vegas and roughly 2/3 of the state’s voters. The Democrats also held serve in Reno’s Washoe County, which is huge, given the fact that (a) the county has a net GOP registration advantage of two points, and (b) the Democrats had already built a lead in ballots cast of 2,500 votes, which is actually a larger margin than in 2012.
As reporter Jon Ralston notes, Clark’s share of the overall turnout thus far is actually larger than their voter registration would suggest. The same is true for Washoe. If there is a region underperforming in turnout thus far, it’s the conservative rural counties, which Ralston says are at a clip more than half a point below their registration numbers. Given that this is far and away Donald Trump’s most reliable base in the state, this is good news for the Democrats.
Also, the weekend was an indication that there seems to have been no grand surge among the GOP, and no grand swoon among the Democrats.
TEXAS
Nearly through a week of early voting in Texas, and while the state still remains an extremely tough get for any Democrat running statewide, it’s worth noting that the trends that gave Team Blue hope early in the week seem to have continued onward as the week rolled on, as you can see in the chart below:
The Democrats have to be thrilled, for example, with their turnout surge in Travis County (Austin), where the early vote thus far is close to double what it was in 2012.
What’s intriguing is that there seems to be a turnout disparity among counties where President Obama did comparably well, and ones where he performed poorly.
That dot way up in the upper-right corner of the chart is Travis County, if you were wondering why Democrats might be enthused about that particular development. But the key here is that, at least through Saturday, the places where boosts in early turnout were the most muted were in counties where the Democrats tended to do the worst in 2012.