Early Vote Update

Without context, the early vote can look bad but that's just Republicans lying to us. AGAIN.

Now that the Early Vote has started for most states and more and more votes are coming in, I see that Republicans are trying to quote Simon Rosenberg, “red wave” this election by either intentionally or ignorantly claim the early vote is going bad for Democrats, not helped by grifters spreading these lies. So I’ll go over each lie and point out that we have nothing to fear.

High Turn out favors Trump

NO! Before Trump, it was wildly accepted that Democrats had the more unreliable base but Trump’s actions has led to the Democratic base becoming more reliable as he pushed away demographics that reliably vote like women and the surburbs. But that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats STILL have massive numbers of low propensity voters that only vote during the presidental elections. An antedoctal example is when I was phonebanking for 2022, I had a Democrat tell me, “I only vote during presidental elections” and then immediately hung up. Trump will bring out his low propensity voters but he will also bring out Democratic low propensity voters who hate him and unfortunately for him, that number outnumbers his incels. The idea that Trump animates new incels to vote for him is insane when data shows it isn’t happening especially when his GOTV operations this year are nonexistent.

We also have more proof that Democrats are motivated this year when various states like Georgia and North Carolina are having record-breaking days of voting. It cannot be just Republicans voting, Democrats MUST be fired up as well. We can see this in North Carolina that records if they voted in 2020 or not.

We see just as many new voters for Democrats as Republicans. Overall this narrative that Trump will animate a larger than normal set of new voters doesn’t fit with the data on the ground. High turn out always favors Democrats because we vastly out number Republicans and the years since Trump took over the Republicans have only juiced our lead.

Changing voter tendencies

If you’re reading anyone analyzes the early vote and they just so happens to leave out that since 2020 both parties’ voting tendencies have changed, they’re trying to spread panic. In 2020, it was true that Democrats generally voted early and thus most states had a “firewall” of blue votes while Republicans instead massively voted on election day. Since then as we saw in 2022, 2023 and even 2024 via the primaries, both parties’ tendencies have changed. Republicans, desperate to fix their GOTV operation that Trump broke, have been pushing their base to vote earlier.

While Democrats have started to return to their old voting tendencies aka they vote later due to the pandemic receding. Before COVID, Republicans actually tended to win the early vote because most Democrats preferred voting on election day. With the pandemic over, Democrats still massively vote by mail but more and more are voting on election day. Data has shown in states that started the early voter sooner, Democrats generally start slower but as more time passes the early vote gets more and more blue.

These change in voter tendencies can lead the uninformed to believe that Democrats are underperforming while the truth is much more complex. Republicans have gotten better at getting their voters to vote earlier but it seems their GOTV hasn’t adapted to their more unreliable base. During the 2023 Virginia statewide election, Republicans did much better in the early vote due to Republicans again pushing it but when it came to election day, Republicans saw to their horror that they had instead cannibalized their e-day vote. On election day, Democrats were keeping up and in some case actually winning the election day vote which led to Democrats flipping back the state House while also keeping the state Senate. There is plenty of evidence to suggest this is happening right now especially when Republican’s 2024 GOTV is far far worse than 2023’s.

GA and AZ

Georgia and Arizona’s early vote especially has people freaking out due to weird polls about the states and the fact they used to be red states. I know that people are worried that Democrats seem to be underperforming compared to 2020? Well with a little research, we can see these two states were a bit unique. If we go to Target Smart and see the modeled party for the early vote, it’s revealed that Republicans actually BEAT Democrats in the early vote during 2020.

But remember even though Republicans beat Democrats during the early vote, both states went blue in 2020 and 2022. So what happened? Well most likely Democrats won the independents in both states as well as plenty of Republicans in the states crossing over to vote for Democrats in both 2020 and 2022.

So without any proper research, it looks that Democrats are in trouble but it seems we have plenty of reason to not worry about either state. Arizona has an abortion referendum and underwent a pretty big blue shift in 2022. While Georgia keeps breaking new turn out records with the counties with massive turnout being Democratic strongholds.

NV and NC.

Oh Nevada, the swing state that acts more like a blue state because of results. Just like AZ and GA, people are freaking out about Nevada’s early results when compared to 2020 but Nevada’s got rather unique issue. Nevada passed automatic voter registration in 2020 so that whenever anyone visits the DMV, they can easily register to vote. But registering this way, you’re automatically registered as Other/Independent thus making it look like Democratic registration in the state looking stalled. This means for Clark county, NV’s biggest and bluest county, independent voters are usually young and very liberal so they tend to break for Democrats hard. It was because of this fact that Democrats won all but 1 seat statewide in NV in 2022. This is especially notable as due to some intraparty drama at the time, the NV Democrats didn’t have full access to their famous GOTV system in 2022 that they have since taken back full control of.

But the biggest cause for this panic is Ralston, the owner of Nevada Independent who is famous on twitter for making accurate predictions for the state. The issue is Ralston is also a big troll who loves to spread doom to get clicks. During 2022, I personally experienced Ralston’s trolling whenever he’d update his daily early vote. For whatever reason, Clark county would always post their mail-in votes later than other counties. Raltson would DAILY act suprised and act as if there was no Clark mail ballots and this “Welp Democrats are SCREWED, read it on my website” before Clark would inevitably update a few hours later and then he’d go “oh looks like there IS mail from Clark!”. He would do this EVERY DAY with the same “surprised” attitude, one day he wrote a poem mocking Democrats freaking out about Clark’s early vote. He even tried to spread more fear when pointing out the registration advantage Democrats had shrunk while ignoring the fact that young liberal voters are now mainly registered as Other, just to spread fear. Ralson may know what is going on but he loves to cause panic to drive traffic. While I’m not saying Nevada can’t be in trouble but there are people plenty of people willing to be ignorant just to scare Democrats so I would be careful of them and their “analysis”.

ps: The others/Independent angle also affects how we read North Carolina. North Carolina has a MASSIVE other/independent population who are also voting early in massive numbers. It’s hard to tell who they’re voting for but considering they’re keeping track with Democrats and Republican early vote in the state, it makes any analysis incomplete just like with NV if you only consider the two main parties. And based on some data on WHO is voting in NC, I wouldn’t be confident in Republicans’ analysis since the Others vote comes from Democratic strongholds.

Blue Wall states

Finally the Blue Wall states aka the states that Harris must win to have a shot to become president. You notice how Republicans have essentally stopped talking about PA and MI’s early vote? That’s because now that the dust has settled, Democratic early vote is through the roof! This is especially important for PA because that was the state Trump’s campaign focused their money on. This is especially notable since PA’s early vote has thus far equaled the same percentage as 2020 since we know most Democrats are waiting on E-Day and more Republicans are voting early.

Because 2020 was the last presidental election, I can understand people comparing 2024 to it. But due to 2020 also being a very unique year, many people are misreading the Early Vote with some are intentionally doing it to depress Democrats. If 2020 was the Red Mirage and 2022 was the Red Wave, 2024 is going to be the Red Turn Out where early signs are misread either ignorantly or intentionally. If anything the story of the early vote has been Republicans pushing the early vote leading to them overperforming compared to 2020 and 2022 while Democrats are slower to start which Republicans use to spread fear. But as time goes on, Republicans peak as Democrat’s early vote gets stronger and stronger. I understand if you’re scared and worried about this election BUT if all you can do is freak out and doom on the internet, you need to STOP. This is a fight for our survival and every expert is telling you 2024 will be different from 2020. I know we all want reassurance that this election will have us winning easily but it will take time for our base to actually vote due to the fact our base is MUCH larger. Don’t listen to people who want to grift off of you or want you to despair. We can and will win if we put in the work so don’t disrespect the people doing the work by giving up.