Early voting has begun in a lot of states and there are a couple of resources you can use to try to read the tea leaves. Maybe the best is the United States Elections Project. Most states have not begun voting yet, and some states that have don’t provide meaningful data on who has requested ballots or who has turned them in.
Interpreting the available data is more art than science because subtle changes in election law can render prior samples hopelessly misleading. And, in any case, the sample sizes here are miniscule.
If you’re looking for a sign of hope on the Democratic side, North Carolina is showing signs of a very robust turnout operation.
North Carolina Republicans have historically done well in mail voting. (In 2010, they cast 44 percent versus just 35 percent for Democrats.) But for now registered Democrats have requested slightly more absentee ballots, and they’ve also returned more ballots.
What’s promising to Democrats: A large share of the absentee ballot requests has come from voters who did not cast a ballot in 2010 (41 percent, to be exact)—and these new voters are more Democratic than the state’s usual mail-voting population: As of Sunday night, registered Democrats had a 7 percentage point edge among those who requested an absentee ballot this year but who had not voted at all in 2010. (That compares to a 4 percentage edge for the GOP among voters who had also voted in 2010.) This skew is not just due to young voters who lean leftward because the Democratic edge is larger among new voters above the age of 23. This may be a early sign of an effective Democratic turnout operation, as it suggests that the surprise advantage registered Democrats have grabbed so far this year is fueled by the addition of new voters, and not just by a shift in how the usual electorate prefers to vote. This set of numbers will be among the most interesting to track in the coming weeks.
On the downside, it looks like Georgia is trying to disappear over 50,000 newly registered voters. It should be no surprise that these voters were registered by a Democratic-backed organization.
What news do you have from your own home states?
