Tensions are high as people’s vibes shift by the hour, spoiled or boosted by the latest poll, campaign event, or news story. But polling data shows just how steady things have been despite everything.
The early vote, though? Well, data is starting to roll in. Let’s take a look.
First, here are this week’s 538 polling averages for swing states, as of Friday at 10 AM ET:
The race remains tight. Polling never perfectly predicts election results, but if Vice President Kamala Harris wins every state where she leads, she’d get 276 electoral votes. Shift everything 1.5 percentage points in Harris’ direction, and she wins 319 to Donald Trump’s 219. Shift everything 0.8 points in Donald Trump’s direction, and he wins 312-226. Yes, such a tight race can stoke anxiety.
Yet the fundamentals remain. Harris has maintained the steady lead over months, and as we’ve seen time and time again, Trump’s support is seemingly capped. He’s never hit 47% nationally and is struggling to even hit 46% in national polling this cycle. His ceiling may be higher in these battlegrounds, but even there, some polls suggest he has a ceiling that hasn’t (yet) constrained Harris.
Furthermore, pollsters can only guess at the makeup of the electorate. Democrats will likely win around 90% of Black women, as Joe Biden did in 2020. Most pollsters will get that right. What they don’t know—and can’t know—is whether Black women will be 8% of the electorate (like in 2020), or 6% of the electorate (like in 2022). The same holds for, say, white men, who will likely be about a third of the electorate and who voted for Republicans in 2022 by 28 points.
Trump’s anemic campaign rallies and his weak fundraising pace relative to his 2020 haul suggest exactly the lack of enthusiasm that might hurt in his turnout game.
Meanwhile, people are voting!
Caveats first. TargetSmart is a data provider for Democratic campaigns. Their “modeled party” takes into account the fact that most unaffiliated voters actually prefer one party or the other. Modeled partisanship also doesn’t tell you which candidates someone voted for, though voting across party lines is rare these days. And it’s a statistical model, meaning it’s prone to potential error. Also, comparing this cycle with previous ones can be imprecise since 1) a midterm election has different dynamics (and lower turnout) than a presidential election, and 2) the 2020 presidential election took place in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, which skewing voter behavior in all manner of ways.
With all those caveats in place, let’s take a look at the early turnout:
Team Blue has come out of the gates strong. Even more exciting is how those numbers look in just the battleground states:
Nationally, Democrats and unaffiliated voters modeled to be voting Democratic are 55.8% of the early vote. But in battleground states, that number is 58.9%. I’ve written multiple times how a good get-out-the-vote operation can be worth around 3 points, and there you have it, literally 3 points. It suggests what we’ve seen and heard the last several months—that Republican complaints about a lack of a Trump ground game are true.
The worst-case scenario is that these early-turnout numbers suggest Democrats are so excited to vote they’re voting even earlier than before. Again, that points to a good ground game, with motivated Democrats doing the hard work of getting people out to vote—phone banking, door knocking, postcard writing, and motivating friends, family, coworkers, and social circles to turn out for Harris.
We’re winning in the polls, we’re winning in fundraising, we’re winning in the early vote. We’re off to a fantastic start. We just need to keep powering forward and close strong.
Let’s do it.
You can help turn out the vote for the election by simply chatting to your neighbors. This is a cool one! Click here to sign up for Daily Kos/Indivisible’s Neighbor2Neighbor get-out-the-vote program.
