North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan
Are Kay Hagan, Charlie Crist or Joni Ernst favored based on early voting statistics? We just can never draw such conclusions from early voting reports alone. We just don't know whether voters who are turning out would have voted anyway or whether parties are modifying their turnout operations to encourage their supporters to shift their mode of voting. Early voting statistics may even be misleading if all we do with them is look at which party accounts for more early ballots, as there may be a whole host of historical patterns, mitigating factors, and legal changes that should affect how we read these numbers.
But once we're armed with that additional context—which these early voting reports aim to provide—these statistics do provide valuable clues as to which parties are struggling to turn out their voters, and which parties are seeing signs that their mobilization efforts are working.
Think about it this way: Getting Democratic voters to turn out in strong numbers during early voting will not save North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan if she cannot pull the same feat on Election Day, or if it comes at an expense of a drop of voters who vote later. But strong early voting is an absolutely essential piece of the machinery that Hagan needs to pull off a win. If we were seeing weaker turnout from registered Democrats it would have us question her chances, but instead Hagan is going into the final week of the election seeing what she needs to see.
Or take the past two cycles: Most polls had Barack Obama losing Florida in 2012 and Harry Reid losing Nevada in 2010. Unusually impressive early voting by registered Democrats in both states made it plausible to think that the polls' likely voter screens may be too tight and that these two candidates' ground games may carry them across the finish lines.
• North Carolina: Democrats have been concerned about their strength ever since Republicans cut the early voting period. But North Carolina has already caught up to the 2010 totals! As of Tuesday morning, as many voters had cast a ballot in-person over five days of early voting as had over twelve days of early voting in 2010.
That robust turnout has been driven by registered Democrats. They account for 50 percent of in-person early votes, compared to 30 percent for Republicans. Taking mail ballots into account, the Democrats' advantage is 48.4 percent to 31.3.
Granted, Democrats have always had a superior early voting operation in this state. But these numbers are strong even compared to past years: Michael Blitzer calculates that Democrats have cast 110 percent as many ballots as they had on the equivalent day in 2010, while Republicans have cast 81 percent as many. And not only is Democrats' current lead (48-31) greater than it was in 2010 (46-37), but for now it is also greater than in the presidential year of 2012, when it stood at 47.6 percent to 31.5 percent. The electorate is also far less white than in 2010, though more so than in 2012: It was 77 percent white in 2010, 68 percent in 2012, 72 percent white as of this point in 2014.
But perhaps it is this chart that contains the most promising sign for Democrats: 21 percent of early voting Democrats did not vote in 2010, versus 17 percent of Republicans. That may seem like a small difference, but it is at least a sign that this year's stronger Democratic turnout cannot entirely be explained by a shift in usual voters' preferred mode of voting.
Races around the country are coming down to the wire. Please chip in $3 to help Democrats win.
Defeat Mitch McConnell in just two hours. Sign up to make GOTV calls to Democrats.
Head over the fold for a look at early voting in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Nevada.
• Colorado: So far 660,113 ballots have already been processed as returned in Colorado, which represents about 36 percent of the total numbers of votes cast in 2010. And hundreds of thousands more have likely already been mailed in by voters. So we're moving toward a resolution here, more quickly than in any other battleground state.
Turnout may be more important here than in any other state because Democratic hopes of re-electing Sen. Mark Udall are dependent on a strong ground game combined with the state's brand-new all-mail system proving polls wrong, just as in 2010.
For now Republicans have a solid lead of 10.4 percentage points among returned ballots. While that gap may seem daunting given the number of voters who have already cast their ballots, it is expected for Republicans to be ahead; even in 2012 they outvoted Democrats by 2 percentage points among Colorado's 1.9 million early voters.
Nate Cohn, whose New York Times bought the Colorado voter files and with it a treasure trove of demographic information, cautions further that the first wave of returned ballots is unrepresentative: "Forty-three percent of early voters are 65 or over, and disproportionately from Republican jurisdictions." He adds that, "twenty-one percent did not participate in 2010, and those voters are far more Democratic than those who participated in 2010."
It is definitely true that the largest Democratic counties are underreporting compared to Republican counties, and there are clear reasons to think this will not signal a drop in Democratic turnout. In Democratic Boulder County, for instance, 43,000 ballots had been processed as cast in the Monday report. At the equivalent point in 2010, it was just 27,000.
That said, it has become very tricky to compare 2014 to past cycles. Yes, Republicans typically grab a large lead among voters who cast their ballot first, but can Democrats shrug that off as they have in the past now that every single registered voter in the state was sent a ballot at the same time?
Also, comparing the partisan breakdown of returned ballots with the breakdown among all registered voters confirms that Republicans are voting at a greater rate than Democrats even if we analyze the numbers by county-by-county.
• Florida: Since in-person voting started, Democrats have daily made up some of the deficit they faced from the GOP's superior rate of mail-in voting. Republicans were outvoting Democrats by 12 percentage points as of Wednesday morning and 10 percentage points as of Friday morning. As of Tuesday morning, the GOP's edge stood at 7 percentage points.
The latest narrowing was helped by Democrats' traditional "Souls to the Polls" operation on Sunday, thanks to which they took a lead among in-person voters for the first time in Monday morning's report.
There is a lot to like for Democrats in these numbers. The GOP's advantage of 14 percentage points during the 2010 midterms has already been halved, and Democrats are likely to make further gains in the coming week.
But Florida also poses unique challenges to such historical comparisons. In 2012 the Obama campaign pushed to get Democrats to vote early in a way they were not accustomed to in this state, and Democrats ended up casting more votes than Republicans. Later a new law was adopted that required that every voter who requested a mail ballot in 2012 also be sent one this year. These two changes may explain some of the changing behavior by Democratic voters this year.
• Georgia: More than half-a-million votes have now been cast in Georgia, though the lack of party registration in the state makes further analysis tricky. What we do know is that 60 percent of early voters are white, and 30 percent are black. And it gets interesting when we look at the difference between early voters who voted in 2010 and those who did not: Among those voters whose race appears on voter files, 67 percent of those who did vote four years ago are white compared to just 50 percent among those who did not vote then.
• Iowa: Democrats have at least deprived Republicans of a talking point: After the Thursday morning report showed that registered Republicans had returned more ballots than registered Democrats, the first time this had happened over at least the past three cycles, Democrats immediately regained an advantage and have increased it since. As of Tuesday morning, their edge stood at 1.1 percentage points among 322,625 ballots cast.
The bad news for Iowa Democrats is clear: These numbers represent a big loss of their historical superiority in early voting. Even in 2010, which saw the defeat of Democratic Gov. Chet Culver, they enjoyed an advantage of 5.5 percentage points by the end of the early voting period. (The edge was 7 percentage points a week out.) And Molly Ball published a new report in The Atlantic on Iowa Democrats' ground game struggles.
The usual early voting question applies here: Do these numbers represent Democratic voters sitting this one out, an influx of new Republican voters, or just a shift in how the usual voters vote? There is one reason to at least rule out the first possibility: More registered Democrats have voted this year seven days out as had voted the Friday before the 2010 election. This is nothing like in Nevada (see below). At the very least, what we are seeing is less a drop in the Democrats' game than Republicans upping theirs: More registered Republicans have voted this year seven days out as had voted the Monday before the 2010 election.
Whether this Republican growth represents an expanded electorate will go a long way toward determining the outcome of the Senate race.
• Nevada: Where are the Democrats? Lacking a strong top of the ticket, it looks like many of them are simply staying home. As Jon Ralston is documenting, overall turnout has dropped considerably compared to the equivalent point in 2010, and turnout among registered Democrats has collapsed.
As of Tuesday morning, the GOP has a statewide lead of about 17,000 ballots, and an absolutely unprecedented lead of 2,000 ballots in Clark County. Adding insult to injury, Republicans are now not only outvoting Democrats in that Democratic county, but they are doing so by comfortable margins: They had an edge of 5 percentage points among Monday voters.
There is some uncertainty as to whether a greater share of Democratic voters than usual will vote on Election Day now that there is no strong statewide campaign mobilizing them urging them to vote early. And their saving grace may be that they do not need as stellar a turnout operation this year as they had in 2010 to re-elect Rep. Steven Horsford or to carry Secretary of State Ross Miller across the finish line in the attorney general contest.
• Others: Millions of votes have been cast in many other states that I cannot cover here, but as always you can check Michael McDonald's excellent website for state-by-state statistics and links to follow all the early voting action.
Races around the country are coming down to the wire. Please chip in $3 to help Democrats win.
Defeat Mitch McConnell in just two hours. Sign up to make GOTV calls to Democrats.
With early voting in full swing across the nation, every day from now until Nov. 4 is Election Day. Please donate today.
