What the early vote is (and isn't) telling us.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

ICYMI.

With Election Day now less than two weeks away, we’re kicking our coverage into full gear. In case you missed it, we added a lot to our election coverage in the last few weeks.

• We released a new episode of our podcast series, The Undecideds, and have only one more episode scheduled before the election.
• We rolled out premium ad-free podcasts for The Undecideds series as well as our daily and Sunday podcast, which you can subscribe to here. 
• We announced our live election watch party in Philadelphia, which is getting close to selling out (but you can still get tickets here).
• We released a Friday edition for paid subscribers where Isaac gave his predictions for the election.

Then, this coming Friday, we’ll release a premium edition to all subscribers about how to spot misinformation about the election online.

Appreciate our approach to independent journalism? Help us out! We’re a finalist for a Shorty Award in News & Media, and it’d mean a lot if you could take a minute to vote for us! Reminder: You can vote once a day until the voting period ends on October 30.

Quick hits.

1. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he expects to receive $1.6 billion from the United States to finance domestic production of long-range weapons, enhancing the country’s ability to strike military targets in Russia. (The funding) Separately, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed a report from South Korea’s main intelligence agency that thousands of North Korean troops are currently training in Russia. (The comments)
2. A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani to turn over his New York City apartment and other assets to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation verdict against the former mayor and advisor to former President Trump. (The order)
3. An E. coli outbreak linked to ingredients in McDonald's Quarter Pounder burgers has sickened at least 49 people from 10 states and killed one person. (The outbreak)
4. News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Perplexity for allegedly plagiarizing news and opinion articles from the media outlets and republishing their work without permission. (The lawsuit)
5. Police in Tempe, Arizona, arrested a 60-year-old man suspected of shooting at a Democratic National Committee office over the last two months, charging him with multiple felonies, including committing an act of terrorism. (The arrest)

Today's topic.

Early voting data. 23 million Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. On September 20, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia became the first three states to allow voters to return mail-in ballots for the 2024 election. As of Wednesday, October 23, 39 states have started in-person early voting, with four states — Delaware, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey— opening up voting later this week.

Reminder: U.S. citizens can place their votes in federal elections early in two different ways. Early voting (or early in-person voting) is a process to allow voters to legally cast their ballots in person before Election Day. Absentee voting, or mail-in voting, allows voters to mail in or drop off their ballots before Election Day. 14 states require an excuse to vote by mail, but 28 others do not, offering “no-excuse” absentee voting (the eight remaining states automatically send every voter a mail-in ballot).

States do not release vote tabulations ahead of Election Day, but most states that allow early voting do release the political affiliation and demographic information associated with the received ballots. Election analysts are now comparing that data to recent elections in 2022 and 2020 seeking clues as to whether the 2024 election is trending towards Republicans or Democrats.

According to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voter tracker, registered Democrats account for 4.9 million (43%) of the early votes nationally, Republicans account for 4.0 million (35%), and unaffiliated or third-party voters account for 2.5 million (22%). According to TargetSmart, a Democratic political data services firm, the national data shows that a greater proportion of registered Republicans are voting early compared to recent presidential elections. In 2020, when mail-in voting was at an all-time high, Democrats returned 20.4 million (51.4%) of early and absentee ballots by this time before the election, while Republicans had returned 15.2 million (38.2%). In 2022, Democrats accounted for 7.4 million (53.4%) of both early and absentee votes to 5.1 million (36.8%) for Republicans. This year, Democrats account for 9.3 million (49.6%) of early and absentee votes to 7.9 million (42.0%) for Republicans.

Partisan identification for early voters across the swing states shows a similar story; Republicans have returned more early and absentee votes this year than they had at this point in 2022 in every swing state except Wisconsin (the others being Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania). 

Though Democrats led Republicans in early and absentee voting in both 2020 and 2022, analysts disagree over whether the voting returns so far indicate that Democrats are losing their advantage or rather that a greater share of Republicans are turning in their ballots ahead of Election Day. 

Below, we’ll break down the analysis of the early voting data from the right and left, then I’ll give my take.

What the right is saying.

• The right says Trump is in a strong position to win the election based on the early vote numbers so far. 
• Some express frustration about how early votes will be counted in key swing states.
• Others say Democrats’ advocacy for early voting could be a double-edged sword. 

In RedState, Ward Clark said “Trump could be 'president on Election Day' if early voting numbers hold up.”

“If current early-voting trends hold, Donald Trump will win the presidential race on Election Day,” Clark wrote. “This is a seismic shift in voting patterns. Democrats have always been very, very good at their ground game, getting their voters to the polls, regardless of whether or not those voters have a heartbeat. They have also, historically, been very good at banking those votes in states that have early voting. But that's changing now - the increase in Republican early-vote turnout is erasing the Democrats' previous advantage. Republicans are, finally, learning to bank their votes.”

“While there's no survey data to cite, one has to wonder if this is a sign of voter enthusiasm on the part of Republicans. The prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency has many Republicans willing to crawl on their hands and knees through a half-mile of scrap iron and busted glass to vote,” Clark said. “Of course, all this may be misleading. This is an odd election; we are quite literally in an undiscovered country in this cycle, with a former president who has been out of office for four years, trying to Grover-Cleveland himself into a non-consecutive second term and who is running against an inarguably incompetent opponent who is the sitting vice president but who was not nominated for the candidacy by any normal process and who did not receive a single primary vote.”

In The New York Post, Rich Lowry criticized the early vote counting system of key states. 

“We no longer have Election Night; we have Election Days. In 2020, the general election was held on Tuesday, Nov. 3, but most media organizations didn’t call it until Saturday, Nov. 7. This kind of delay is a national embarrassment. It creates uncertainty and breeds distrust, and is also completely unnecessary,” Lowry said. “The culprit is early voting, or how some states go about processing — or to be more accurate, not processing — the early vote. Only in government is it possible to have people do something well in advance and still have it end up delaying everything, out of easily fixable bureaucratic ineptitude.

“Consider Pennsylvania. It embraced no-excuse mail voting in 2019, without making the necessary changes to count these ballots in a timely manner. In their wisdom, the Pennsylvania authorities don’t allow election employees to begin processing the early and absentee vote until 7 a.m. on Election Day, ensuring that they can’t cope,” Lowry wrote. “An erstwhile swing state, Florida, provides a model. It has a massive early vote, and yet rapid tabulating. Counties in the state process early ballots before Election Day. It helps that the state doesn’t allow ballots arriving after 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, avoiding the problems of states that, shockingly, permit post-election ballots.”

In The Daily Caller, Gage Klipper wrote “Democrats’ championing of early voting could come back to haunt them.”

“Remember when Democrats tried to convince us that any opposition to mail-in voting was a threat to democracy and public health? Well, that short-sighted position could come back to haunt them this time around. Early votes are already coming in, and they’re coming in fast,” Klipper said. “The numbers really don’t matter yet anyway; it’s far too early to speculate what they may mean. However, it’s safe to say that Democrats generally seem to have the lead. Registered Democrats make up 51% of the ballots returned so far, while only 32% come from registered Republicans.”

“The more salient point is that this is even happening at all. Nearly seven million votes is a shockingly high figure for mid-October, especially when you consider that the race feels like it’s just starting to heat up. Yet this is the bed that Democrats made for America. In 2020, COVID became a convenient excuse to normalize the decidedly not-normal concept of voting weeks before an election,” Klipper wrote. “While we’re still a far cry from 2020 figures, it’s safe to say that early and mail-in voting has become the uncontested norm. Rather than (ineffectively) fight it as they did in 2020, Republicans are finally getting in on the action, encouraging their voters to turn out sooner rather than later.”

What the left is saying.

• The left thinks Republicans are overconfident about the early vote numbers, and Harris is still in a strong position. 
• Some acknowledge that the GOP is outperforming past elections in the early vote.
• Others say Republicans’ early vote improvement was expected and not yet concerning. 

In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore suggested “early voting looks good for Harris but could be an illusion.”

“Reports about which party (or presidential candidate) is doing well in early voting should come with a number of huge asterisks. Only 23 states report early voting numbers according to voters’ party registration status. Among those (roughly half of early votes cast so far), according to Election Lab, registered Democrats represent 46.5 percent of early voters and registered Republicans represent 32.5 percent with the rest (20.9 percent) being unaffiliated,” Kilgore wrote. “Should the Kamala Harris camp be enthused about this (heavy asterisks!) ‘lead’? Maybe. Votes already cast are ‘banked’ votes, which allows the campaign to focus on undecided or unmobilized voters.

“But almost everywhere, early voters are very likely to be people who would have voted in any circumstances, so a given party’s heavy early vote share doesn’t necessarily mean a heavy overall vote. It’s also worth remembering that early-voting breakdowns in non-battleground states may affect the national popular vote but won’t determine the election winner,” Kilgore said. “How this will play out on Election Night this time around is more than a little unclear, depending on how rapidly votes are counted and which votes are counted first, which varies state to state.”

In CNN, Zachary B. Wolf wrote about “what we know” from the early voting numbers.

“In these early reports, there are some hints that Republicans may be cutting into the Democratic edge in early voting. More Republicans than Democrats have cast ballots in Nevada, and the parties are on par in North Carolina, according to the early data. That might cause concern for Democrats who remember 2020, when Democratic mail-in votes were critical to Joe Biden’s victory. It could also simply mean Republicans are doing more to encourage early voting,” Wolf said. “In any event, more early Republican votes could cut down on what was perceived as a ‘blue shift’ when Democratic-leaning, mail-in ballots were counted after Republican-leaning Election Day ballots in key states in 2020.”

“In Nevada, where fewer than 1.5 million voters cast ballots for president in 2020, a little fewer than 250,000 have cast votes so far in 2024. But unlike in Georgia, more men than women have cast ballots, according to the available data,” Wolf wrote. “It’s the opposite in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Rust Belt states where more women have cast early ballots. Fewer than 400,000 ballots have been cast so far in Wisconsin, compared with more than 3 million ballots cast for president in 2020. Close to a million ballots have been cast early in Pennsylvania in 2024, compared with nearly 7 million total votes in 2020.”

In Hopium Chronicles, Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg said the election is still “far more likely to break for” Harris than Trump.

“2024 is not going to be like 2020 or 2022. It is going to be 2024, and the early vote is not behaving anything like these two previous elections. In attempting to analyze the early vote this time we are also handicapped by having our baseline for comparison as 2020, the COVID election, which was anomalous in so many ways,” Rosenberg wrote. “The bottom line — we should expect Republicans to perform better than 2020 in the early vote this year. First, they are trying much harder to drive the early vote this time, learning from having been burned by their poor performances in 2020 and 2022.”

“Second, some of our core vote, young Democrats who are running 2 to 1 for Harris, are going to show up this time as unaffiliated. As we did not have a Presidential primary to encourage younger voters to register as Dems, some of our vote will be hiding in the unaffiliated column this time,” Rosenberg said. “Having said that, I still think we are where I have believed we have been for weeks now — favored to win. We have a steady, sturdy lead in the national popular vote and are closer to 270 in the battlegrounds. While it is still early in the early vote, we are showing real strength in MI, NE and WI, and are competitive everywhere else.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• Simply put, it’s a fool’s errand to predict the election outcome based on this data.
• The presidential race is still a coin flip, and both sides can find reasons for optimism in the early vote. 
• We can learn more about the state of the race by watching how each candidate is campaigning. 

I know that this is the part where I'm supposed to give you a bunch of geeky analysis about the early hints on where this election is trending, but I have promised readers to be honest and transparent when sharing my own opinion. So let me be as honest as I can: I don't think any of this data provides actual clues to the outcome of this election.

I really hate to burst everyone's bubble, especially as we all look for narratives to latch onto going into the home stretch of the 2024 election, but this early voting data is not very revealing. The absolute most it tells us is that Republicans are listening to political leaders like Donald Trump who are finally encouraging them to get out and vote early (unlike the last two cycles). This is meaningful at least in the sense that it demonstrates some kind of voter enthusiasm; it also means that Republican organizers can cross some voters off their “turnout” list and focus on the people who haven’t voted yet. This is helpful, and it’s why early voting is an advantage in elections and why Democrats have focused on it so much in the last few years. 

But if you think it’s news that Republicans are motivated to oust the Biden-Harris administration, you haven’t been paying attention.

We all have short memories. Otherwise, we'd be discussing the fact that heading into the 2022 midterms, the early vote results seemed to indicate Republicans were going to crush Democrats across the country. It turned out there was a very simple thing happening: More Republicans were voting early and more Democrats were voting on Election Day than in 2020, when we were in the midst of a pandemic. On Election Day, Democrats turned out, and the race fundamentally changed. This year, Democrats are still turning out more early voters than Republicans; their advantage is simply less than it was in 2020.

I'll repeat something I said when I made my election predictions on Friday: The presidential race is basically a coin flip. Either candidate could end up sweeping the swing states and "crushing" the other in the Electoral College, or — as I expect — they could split some of the swing states and the race will come down to tens of thousands of votes across a few battlegrounds. Everything is within the polling margin of error, all the forecasters are giving each candidate roughly a 50% chance to win, and neither Harris nor Trump is clearly separating themselves in the early vote.

Remember: Harris has had a steady 2%, 3%, or 4% national polling lead since her campaign got off the ground. The battlegrounds are, well, battles. If the polls skew as they did in 2022, Harris will dominate; she’ll win Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. If the polls skew as they did in 2020, Trump will win all of those states, plus Georgia. If we get something in between, it'll be a very close finish.

Across the battlegrounds, the polling averages are shifting ever so slightly toward Trump, which could be a sign of late momentum. Or, it could be a sign of Republicans flooding the zone with unreliable, partisan polls. Or, that could be a Democratic talking point. The House remains a toss-up, though a few key races are moving toward Democrats. In the Senate, Pennsylvania is trending toward Republicans while Nebraska is trending toward Democrats. Wrap your head around that. 

This is where we are: a very close and competitive election.

Something else interesting is happening right now, too: Both candidates are hitting non-battleground states in the final days. Trump is going to New York, presumably to help Republicans in Congress. Harris is going to Texas and Kentucky, presumably to help Democrats in Congress. This is a sign both of their campaigns believe they are in strong positions down the home stretch, and they are starting to reach out to voters they may not typically get.

The 30,000-foot view, to me, looks like this:

Democrats have a financial advantage and a better, more organized ground game. They are running against a historically unpopular candidate many view as a threat to democracy, and they have a decisive issue (abortion) that is turning out voters in droves and widening the already-historic (and increasingly fascinating) gender gap. They are polling ahead of Republicans in battleground Senate races (but will likely lose their majority because of how many seats they are defending), they poll better on generic ballots, and they took the unprecedented step of replacing their incumbent candidate just months out from Election Day (which makes all of these signals very noisy and difficult to parse).

Republicans, meanwhile, are running against an incumbent administration in an environment where Americans are dissatisfied with the economy, panicked about immigration, fearful of crime, and disappointed in the foreign policy outcomes from the last four years. They are running against a candidate who, by some measures, is even more unpopular than their own. They have a presidential candidate whose floor of support never moves, an incredible opportunity to flip the Senate, and the ability to run on a campaign of change in an era where voters most often cast ballots to get rid of whoever is in office. These are all significant and critical advantages, which is why I think Trump will ultimately win the election.

Nobody knows what is going to happen, and none of these trends are definitive one way or the other. The early voting data tells us only what we already knew: A lot of people are going to vote in this election, and both parties are successfully motivating their bases.

Take the survey: What do you think the early voting data tells us about this year’s election? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Here’s a question: how do we go about getting money out of politics? And make our voices heard a little more (lobbyists voices count more because $$$).

— Josiah from Instagram

Tangle: Let me start by asking what might sound like an easy question: What is the money you want to take out of politics?

When you think of money in politics, you probably think of campaign donations — corporate lobbyists raising funds for politicians in a silent quid pro quo, or mega-rich donors dangling gobs of cash to support their own interests. These are all important issues that we need to consider. Super PACs, this year, are dumping unprecedented cash into elections. And it’s getting harder and harder to tell where the money is coming from. It’s a serious problem. 

What you might not be thinking about is why a politician might want that kind of money, which isn’t all put toward TV ads and PR campaigns (and, of course, pocketing campaign donations for themselves is illegal). Politicians need to meet their constituents, to travel across their states (or country in the case of presidential candidates), to hire staff, to contract out pollsters, and feed and train volunteers to help them understand their voters and be able to reach them.

That may be putting too friendly a spin on campaign donations. And yes, I think the sheer quantity of campaign dollars distorts our process in an unhealthy way. But mainly I want to stress that I don’t think the headline-grabbing figures of hundreds of millions of dollars is the only kind of money we should be looking to limit in politics.

When it comes to getting money out of politics, I think there are two better places to start: Restricting members of Congress from being allowed to trade stocks and make active investments while in office, and prohibiting politicians from taking jobs as lobbyists or industry regulators after they leave office (which can lead to regulatory capture). Those two categories probably influence our legislative process just as much as big money in elections — and legislation has been proposed to counter both of them before. 

If we, as an electorate, can unify around those issues and push for reform, I think we can actually achieve it.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

Deceptive fundraising schemes have misled elderly Americans into donating millions of dollars to political campaigns, according to a CNN investigation published this week. Many of these donors are battling dementia or other cognitive impairments and either forget their donation history or unwittingly approve recurring donations due to confusing language on donation sites. For example, both Republican and Democratic fundraising platforms use a controversial feature that authorizes repeat donations by default if a donor does not uncheck a box while attempting to make a small, one-time contribution. The report found that some elderly citizens don’t realize they have been regularly sending campaign money for months or years. In one case, an 80-year-old communications engineer with dementia inadvertently became one of the country’s largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party after donating nearly $500,000 to former President Donald Trump and other candidates as his cognitive abilities declined. CNN has the story.

Numbers.

• 55,056,724. The number of mail-in and early in-person votes requested nationally as of October 23, according to NBC News’s aggregation of TargetSmart and state data. 
• 1,137,638. The number of early and absentee votes cast in Michigan as of October 23, according to TargetSmart. 
• 3,260,375. The total number of early and absentee votes cast in Michigan in 2020. 
• 997,383. The number of early and absentee votes cast in Pennsylvania as of October 23. 
• 2,636,203. The total number of early and absentee votes cast in Pennsylvania in 2020.
• 83%. The percentage of Democrats who said any U.S. voter should have the option to vote early or absentee without having to document a reason in 2018, according to Pew Research.
• 82%. The percentage of Democrats who said any U.S. voter should have the option to vote early or absentee without having to document a reason in 2024.
• 57%. The percentage of Republicans who said any U.S. voter should have the option to vote early or absentee without having to document a reason in 2018.
• 37%. The percentage of Republicans who said any U.S. voter should have the option to vote early or absentee without having to document a reason in 2024.

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about Donald Trump’s gag order.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the voting page for our Shorty Award nomination.
• Nothing to do with politics: How a 3.26-billion-year-old meteor affected the trajectory of life on earth.
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,313 readers responded to our survey asking about Trump’s McDonald’s visit with 48% saying it does not change how they view the candidates. “Trump is funny which helps him but he also sometimes goes off the rails which hurts him,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Caritas Bakhita House in London provides refuge for women who have been exploited and trafficked. Four years ago, the house gained a new feline addition: a black-and-white cat named Marley. Karen Anstiss, the head of the house, describes Marley as “a wonderful example of the power of love. Often Marley placing a paw on our guests’ legs is the first kindness they’ve experienced in years. He has this incredible gift of empathy and has assisted many, many women along the road to recovery.” In honor of his contributions to the house, Marley recently won Cat Protection’s Cat of the Year award. The Guardian has the story.

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