Early voting is being deployed across the country, including in key battleground states such as Georgia, where more than 300,000 people voted on Tuesday, the first day of early voting.
Although Virginia is not a core state this year, it already has more than two weeks of mail-in and early in-person voting on the books, including hundreds of thousands of ballots already cast. We are closely monitoring early voting trends to set expectations for election night outcomes, and a clear pattern has emerged in Virginia that could be part of a national trend.
So-called consistent voters — the people who regularly turn out to vote in most elections — have already made substantial use of in-person voting in Virginia, especially in areas that tend to support Republican candidates. As several other states begin early voting, we’ll be watching closely to see if similar patterns hold elsewhere, as early voting has important implications for how election results could unfold on election night.
Virginia’s first two weeks of voting by mail and early in-person voting suggest the gap between early voting in Republican and Democratic counties could be smaller in 2024 than in 2020.
The table above shows how many votes and ballots were cast in 2020 based on a jurisdiction’s overall preference toward Democratic or Republican candidates. In 2020, about 2.8 million, or 63%, of Virginia’s approximately 4.5 million votes were cast before Election Day. However, there were significant differences in the number of early voters based on the party political preference of a city or county. In cities and counties that strongly favor Democratic candidates, 70% of voters cast absentee ballots. By comparison, only about 50% of voters in Republican-leaning counties and cities cast absentee ballots.
The table below compares how many 2024 absentee ballots were returned in the same areas as of Oct. 11, according to TargetSmart, a voter data provider. So far in 2024, more votes have taken place in Republican-leaning places than in Democratic-leaning places.
One way to capture this trend is to calculate the percentage of 2020 votes in an area that have already been cast via absentee ballots in 2024. This ranges from about 12% in the most Democratic-leaning areas to almost 22% in the Republican-leaning areas.
TargetSmart also provides information on how often these voters participated in the past three statewide general elections (the 2020 presidential election, the 2021 gubernatorial election, and the 2022 midterm elections).
Voters who participated in most or all of these elections will almost certainly vote in the upcoming presidential election — meaning that the fact that these voters cast their ballots well before Election Day rather than later doesn’t tell us much about what drives turnout will be. look like. However, if early voters are less consistent or new voters, this could signal a shift in electoral trends heading into November.
So far, it appears that about 90% of the people who voted in Virginia are consistent voters who participated in at least two or three of these elections. And there are no meaningful differences in the share of consistent voters based on the partisan leaning in the area.
While it may be tempting to interpret these patterns as evidence that consistent Democratic voters will vote at a lower rate than Republicans in Virginia, we believe such a conclusion is premature. To see why, the table below uses data from the Virginia Public Access Project to show when absentee voters cast ballots in the state’s 2022 election.
Specifically, the table shows what share of the total number of absentee ballots were recorded 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 had been cast. Notably, a higher percentage of absentee ballots were cast in more Republican-supporting areas than in more Democratic-supporting areas.
Why might voters in more Democratic-leaning areas cast their votes later than in more Republican-leaning areas? One possible explanation is the availability of “satellite voting locations” in some Virginia jurisdictions. These are additional locations, outside the general registration office of a province or city, where voters can cast their votes in person early from later in October. These satellite voting locations can make early in-person voting accessible in more densely populated areas, which tend to be more Democratic-oriented. We will keep a close eye on whether these area differences level out or even reverse in the coming weeks when satellite voting begins.
If we continue to find that turnout in Democratic areas lags behind Republican areas after satellite voting begins, this would prompt us to do more research on whether consistent Democratic voters appear to be less mobilized this election cycle than normal.
Why these patterns matter to the NBC News Decision Desk
Part of the reason the NBC News Decision Desk is keeping such a close eye on absentee ballots is because of their implications for the order of how votes are reported on election night. The fact that Democrats were more likely to cast mail-in and early in-person voting than Republicans made our work at the Decision Desk in 2020 more challenging than usual.
We are used to counties reporting election results at different rates on election night. In some states, smaller, largely rural counties tend to be the first to cast ballots, while in others, larger, mostly urban counties are the first to report. We have long used models that try to explain this disparity by analyzing whether the counties that reported more votes tend to be more Democratic or Republican in previous elections than the counties that reported fewer votes. These models help us assess what the current reported results suggest about the likely end outcomes.
Before 2020, these models did not sufficiently take into account the fact that provinces also do not report different results per voting mode at the same speed. In some states, counties report mail-in and early in-person ballots first, and then Election Day ballots. In other cases this order is reversed.
When it became clear in 2020 that Democrats would disproportionately vote by mail or in person, and Republicans would disproportionately vote on Election Day, we had to quickly improve our models to account for not only differences in election reporting numbers , but also because of provinces, but also because of the differences in which voting modes were counted. And while we are now in a better position to address this issue, it will still generally take longer to project races in states where there are substantial partisan differences in voters’ use of mail, early personal voting and differences in the speed of reporting via voting mode.
However, seeing this data from Virginia makes us cautiously optimistic that we will see less partisan differences by voting mode in 2024 than in 2020, at least in states like Virginia that have expanded in-person voting.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
