What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

Today is Election Day, but voters have actually been voting for more than a month. It’s common for pundits and the media to try to read early-voting numbers as tea leaves for how the election as a whole will turn out, but the correlation between early-voting numbers and election results is actually quite flimsy.

First of all, results are not reported until after polls close on Election Day. So when you hear about early-voting numbers, what you’re hearing about is the party registration data of those who voted early — and party registration does not necessarily correspond with vote choice. (For instance, in states like Ohio and Texas, party registration is determined by the last primary you voted in.) Then there’s the fact that independent early voters are a total black box. If 40 percent of early voters are Republican and 30 percent are Democrats, there’s still plenty of room for the 30 percent who are independents to swing the election to either party.

Early voting is a relatively new phenomenon, and its patterns are ever-changing. Just because a lot of Republicans have historically voted early doesn’t mean that it will play out that way next time. And if historic levels of Democrats are voting early, it could be a sign of heightened Democratic enthusiasm … or it could be that reliable Democratic voters who used to vote on Election Day are now voting early.

Oh, yeah, and then there are those Election Day voters, who make up a majority of the electorate in most states. There’s no guarantee that they will follow the same patterns as early voters; in fact, it kind of makes sense that people who vote early are pretty unrepresentative — demographically, culturally, politically — of the people who wait until the last minute. In 2016, we saw that happen in North Carolina, where Hillary Clinton won the early vote by 2.5 points, but Donald Trump won the Election Day vote by 15.6 points.

Kirsten Fairycat sends this sticker from central Illinois.

Medicaid is on the ballot in four states today. In Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, voters will decide whether to expand Medicaid for the first time under the Affordable Care Act. (States can choose to extend the program to cover more low-income people, and 17 states — all of which have a Republican governor, legislature or both — have chosen not to.) Montanans are deciding whether to make their 2015 expansion permanent.

Medicaid expansion has always been one of the more popular parts of the Affordable Care Act; even in states that haven’t expanded, a majority of residents, 56 percent, say they’d like the program to cover more people (though, as with most topics, there are partisan divides). All four ballot initiatives are polling well. In Montana, where a tobacco tax would pay for the expansion, the tobacco industry has spent millions fighting the initiative in the last few weeks, which has the potential to tip the already close vote there.

This isn’t the first time Medicaid has been on the ballot — Mainers voted to expand the program using a ballot initiative in 2017 (though Governor Paul LePage has essentially refused to implement it). Despite the potential for legislators to stand in the way, activists have told me they increasingly see these ballot initiatives as a way to pass popular progressive laws in red states.