What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms
Now on the opposite side of town, the Columbarium, where many dead San Franciscans are interred and many more will be voting today. (Coolest polling place ever.) pic.twitter.com/Hl62Nrg1U4
— Gwendolyn Wu (@gwendolynawu) November 6, 2018
A Warning About The Early Vote
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.
