In 2020, I did something I had never done before. I voted early in a presidential election. There was more than one reason for this. The first and most important is that it was an option. Prior to 2020, we did not have no-excuse absentee balloting in Pennsylvania. If we had had that option, I might have utilized it to help the Democrats narrow the field of people they needed to contact as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. In 2020, I gave them that benefit. The other reason I voted early is because I had no plans to show up in person at my precinct on Election Day and possibly expose myself to the COVID-19 virus. There were people in my life with asthma, high blood pressure and other preexisting conditions who were at high risk of dying from COVID-19, and I didn’t want to be the cause.
So, instead of waiting for Election Day to go to the elementary school where I normally vote, I went early to the central municipal building in West Chester, which is the county seat, and I put my ballot in a dropbox. This meant that my vote wasn’t counted on Election Night when the early returns showed Trump winning Pennsylvania. My example was repeated by hundreds of thousands of Democrats throughout the Keystone State in 2020, and as the early votes were tallied in the days after the election, Trump’s lead very predictably narrowed and then completely disappeared. He lost.
This year I am going to revert back to how I voted in 2016, in person on Election Day at that elementary school. Even though I’m tempted to vote early to help GOTV efforts, I like voting in person on Election Day and I especially like knowing my vote will be counted right away, and everyone will see it on their television screens on Election Night.
I tell this story because it will help you understand the significance of this article in Politico. The main theme of the article is about the early vote with Pennsylvanians over 65, and I’m not that old yet. But there are two things about the elder vote here that are encouraging to the Democrats. The first and most important is that several polls are showing Harris winning the elder vote, where Clinton and Biden lost it. The second is that pollsters are asking people they contact who have already cast a ballot who they voted for, and they’re seeing an advantage for Harris here, too.
This is positive news, but it’s not why I’m writing this.
As people try to read the tea leaves of the Pennsylvania early vote, the challenge is that it didn’t really exist in 2016 and in 2020 it was really, really distorted. The first reason it was so distorted in 2020 was the Republicans were less likely to take precautions about COVID-19, which meant that they died in much higher numbers than Democrats but also that they were much more willing to vote in person. The second reason is that Trump relentlessly attacked early voting in Pennsylvania and discouraged Republicans from using that method. The final tally of early votes was 1,702,484 for the Democrats and 623,404 for the Republicans.
So, with over a million more Democrats voting early than Republicans in 2020, you’d expect to see things like more women voted early than men. Pick any demographic group from 2020 that favors Democrats and they are overrepresented in the early vote.
Now, all of this presents two problems for examining the 2024 early vote. The first is that Trump is no longer discouraging early voting among Republicans (at least, not consistently), and therefore we should expect a higher percentage of them to use the option than in 2020. The second is all the people like me, Democrats who voted early last time but will revert back to voting on Election Day this time. It’s like loosening the tension on a rubber band, with both sides meeting closer to the middle. This time around, the Democrats’ early voting lead should not exceed a million votes, but they won’t take the same drubbing on Election Day either.
Now, looking at the early vote, a lot of Republican analysts and campaign spokespeople are encouraged to see the Democrats banking less of an advantage. But since this was always baked in the cake, the challenge is to know how much of a difference is required to signal a better outcome.
In Pennsylvania, the biggest battleground in the Blue Wall, Republicans are encouraged because the partisan gap in ballots returned so far has narrowed significantly since 2020. Democrats hold only a 25-point advantage, compared to nearly 50 points four years ago. That is a sign that GOP efforts to encourage their voters to bank ballots early have had success.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are emphasizing something different:
Roughly 35 percent of Republicans who have cast ballots so far in Pennsylvania are voters who cast ballots on Election Day in 2020, according to a POLITICO analysis of the state’s early voting data.
By contrast, around 8 percent of Democrats who have voted in the state voted on Election Day in 2020. Those figures suggest that the early vote in Pennsylvania is likely to be redder than four years ago — and the Election Day vote is likely to be bluer — based on how voters are switching the timing of their votes.
This is exactly what we expected to see, with the Republicans cannibalizing more of their Election Day vote than the Democrats. Now, put that together with the data on the elder vote, and the Democrats are feeling good. That’s because “voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots” and “registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans.”
Then there’s survey data on the elder vote as a whole. The most recent Fox News poll of Pennsylvania has Trump “running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over.” That’s troubling for the Republicans because elders have the highest percentage turnout of any demographic, and 53 percent of them voted for Trump last time in a losing effort.
If Harris actually wins the elder vote, Trump will have to make up for it with big gains among younger voters compared to his performance against Biden. The early elder vote does show some serious promise for Harris carrying their support. Remember, the early vote as a whole is less distorted this time, so a lead is more significant because it’s harder to close. It’s true that offsetting this is a smaller lead, but a 23-point advantage for elder registered Democrats over elder registered Republicans is still a good starting point.
So much of the outcome will depend on how independents split that I need to warn against focusing too much on numbers based solely on partisan registration participation. Other factors could be decisive, like how many young men of all races vote for Trump, and how many Republican women cross over (secretly or not) to cancel out their husbands’ votes.
Hopefully, this explanation will help you with the unique factors in Pennsylvania you need to understand the early vote and the results when they begin to come in next Tuesday.
