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What weeks of early voting data will tell us how Democrats and Republicans will fare in 2024?

Posted on by Kennedy
What weeks of early voting data will tell us how Democrats and Republicans will fare in 2024?

Early voting is underway across the country, including in key battleground states like Georgia, where more than 300,000 people cast ballots on Tuesday, the first day of early voting.

Even though Virginia is not one of the main polling locations this year, it already has more than two weeks of mail-in and early in-person voting on the schedule, including hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots already cast. We're closely monitoring early voting trends to set expectations for election night results, and a clear pattern has emerged in Virginia that could be part of a national trend.

So-called habitual voters — those who show up to vote regularly in most elections — have already made extensive use of early in-person voting in Virginia, particularly in areas that tend to support Republican candidates. As several other states begin early voting, we will be watching closely to see whether similar patterns hold elsewhere, as early voting has important implications for how election results could unfold on election night.

The first two weeks of mail-in and early in-person voting in Virginia suggest the gap between early voting in Republican and Democratic counties may be narrower this year compared to 2020.

The table above shows how many votes and mail-in ballots were cast in 2020, based on a jurisdiction's overall bias toward Democratic or Republican candidates. In 2020, about 2.8 million, or 63%, of Virginia's approximately 4.5 million total votes were cast before Election Day. However, there were significant differences in the number of early voters depending on the partisanship of a city or county. In cities and counties that heavily favor Democratic candidates, 70% of voters cast absentee ballots. In comparison, only about 50% of voters in Republican-leaning counties and cities cast absentee ballots.

The table below compares how many 2024 mail-in ballots were returned in the same areas as of Oct. 11, according to TargetSmart, a voter data provider. So far, places that tend to support Republicans have seen more absentee voting than places that lean Democratic.

One way to capture the trend is to calculate the percentage of 2020 votes in an area that were already cast by mail in 2024. The range ranges from about 12% in areas most supportive of Democrats to nearly 22% in areas most leaning Republican.

TargetSmart also provides information on how frequently such voters voted in the last three statewide general elections (the 2020 presidential election, the 2021 gubernatorial election, and the 2022 midterm election).

Voters who voted in most or all of these elections will almost certainly vote in the upcoming presidential election. That means that observing that these voters cast their votes well before Election Day rather than later doesn't say much about what turnout will look like. However, if early voters are less consistent or new voters, it could indicate a shift in voting trends before November.

So far, it appears that about 90% of people who voted in Virginia are repeat voters who voted in at least two or three of those elections. And there are no significant differences in the proportions of long-term voters based on the region's partisan leanings.

Although it might be tempting to interpret the patterns as evidence that consistent Democratic voters in Virginia will cast lower votes than Republicans, we believe such a conclusion is premature. To understand why, the table below uses data from the Virginia Public Access Project to show when voters cast absentee ballots in the state in the 2022 election.

Specifically, the table shows what proportion of the total postal votes cast were registered 25 days before the election. The data shows that at this point in 2022, only about 21% of early in-person ballots and 39% of mail-in ballots have been cast. Notably, a higher percentage of mail-in ballots were cast in areas where there was more support for Republicans than in areas where there was more support for Democrats.

Why might voters in more Democratic-leaning areas cast their ballots later than in more Republican-supporting areas? One possible explanation is the availability of “satellite voting locations” in some Virginia jurisdictions. These are additional locations that go beyond the registry office of a district or city and where voters can cast their votes early in person from the end of October. Such satellite polling stations could allow early in-person voting in more populated areas that tend to lean Democratic. We will be watching closely to see whether these regional differences level out or potentially reverse over the next few weeks as satellite tuning begins.

If we continue to observe voter turnout lagging behind in Democratic areas compared to Republican areas after satellite voting begins, this would prompt us to examine more closely whether consistent Democratic voters appear to be less mobilized than normal in this election cycle.

Why these patterns matter to the NBC News Decision Desk

One reason the NBC News Decision Desk is watching mail-in voting so closely is because it affects the order in which voting is reported on election night. The fact that Democrats used mail-in and early in-person voting more frequently than Republicans made our work on the Decision Desk more difficult than usual in 2020.

We are used to counties reporting election results at different speeds on election night. In some states, smaller, mostly rural counties typically report their votes first, while in others, larger, mostly urban counties report first. We have long used models that attempt to explain such disparities by analyzing whether counties that reported more votes tended to lean more Democratic or Republican in past elections than counties that reported fewer votes. The models allow us to assess what the currently reported results say about the likely end results.

Before 2020, such models did not adequately account for the fact that counties also do not report different results depending on voting mode at the same rate. In some states, counties report absentee and early in-person voting first, then Election Day votes. In other cases the order is reversed.

When it became clear in 2020 that Democrats would disproportionately vote by mail or early in-person and Republicans would disproportionately vote on Election Day, we had to quickly improve our models to account not only for differences in reporting rates across counties, but also for differences in the voting modes that were counted. And while we are now in a better position to deal with this issue, it will still generally take longer to project races in states where there are significant partisan differences in voters' use of mail and early in-person voting, as well as the speed gives the reporting in voting mode.

However, given Virginia's data, we are cautiously optimistic that we will see fewer partisan differences by voting mode in 2024 than in 2020, at least in states like Virginia that have extensive early in-person voting.

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