By Jim Ellis — Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024
Voting Patterns
In the first of what promises to be several early voting updates, we take a look at the TargetEarly/TargetSmart pre-election vote calculations from what promises to be a smaller universe than we saw in 2020.
We will remember that voting by mail in the 2020 presidential year was virtually universal, put in place by court order due to the COVID-19 emergency. After the election, the Supreme Court ruled that courts cannot arbitrarily change state election laws on a permanent basis, meaning that unless the state changed its laws since 2020, the system returns to pre-COVID-19 status.
Nationally, we now see almost 14.5 million votes already recorded at this writing, which is just 15.7 percent of the total number we saw throughout the 2020 cycle, a number that exceeded 92.4 million.
The most interesting pattern in these early returns is the increase in rural early voting. Nationally, the rural early ballot returns are up 8.3 percentage points over the 2020 total. Conversely, urban early voting is down 10.8 percentage points. The suburban early vote is up 2.4 points.
The first two stat points appear to help Republicans, while the suburban increase slightly offsets what could be GOP gains. On the other hand, the modeled partisan projection finds Democrats running a bit ahead of their aggregate percentage share in comparison to 2020 (3.7 points), while Republicans are slightly behind their overall performance share from four years ago (-1.3). Therefore, the comparison of the geographic vote versus the partisan complexion appears at least partially inconsistent in terms of which party benefits to the greater extent.
In looking at the seven top battleground states, three, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin, are reporting early vote totals less than 20 percent of the 2020 total. The state with the most early votes as compared to its 2020 performance is Georgia, which has already reached 33.3 percent of its previous total.
Here, the partisan participation trends are on par with what we saw in the 2020 presidential election, but the increase in rural voting (up 6.6 percentage points when compared to Joe Biden’s winning election) and decrease in urban participation at least at this current point in the process (down 4.5 percentage points) suggests these earliest statistics may help Republican candidates.
In Michigan, with early vote totals reaching 28.9 percent of the 2020 totals, Democrats have a big edge in what appears to be the partisan returns (13.4 percentage points better than 2020), with Republicans running at parity. The big drop comes within the Independent sector, which is down 10.9 percentage points in the early going.
Continuing in the Wolverine State, we again see the rural turnout topping the 2020 share percentage (up 4 percentage points) while the urban vote is down 7.2 points. While the partisan numbers would appear to help the Democrats, the geographic voting appears as a Republican benefit.
The other major battleground state to record a large number of early votes, like Michigan with 28.9 percent thus far of the 2020 early vote, is Pennsylvania. We again see the same pattern, where Democrats are up over their 2020 early vote share (6.3 percentage points) while Republicans are at parity and Independents dropping 5.9 percentage points from their previous presidential election performance.
And, as in the other states, the Pennsylvania rural turnout is up, in this case slightly (4.2 percentage points), while the suburban and urban participation counts are at parity with their 2020 standing.
As early voting proceeds, we will likely see more definitive patterns emerge as we move ever closer toward the Nov. 5 Election Day. The early vote numbers suggest that each party remains highly competitive throughout the ballot since the current patterns yield only slight edges to either side.