VA Early Voting #s

[SnowLabrador]

Numbers seem sluggish. Alarm bells should be going off for Democrats.

[SnowLabrador]

early in person votes: 145,784

early mail ballots: 93,516

Who is that good for?

[SnowLabrador]

Biden needs to fire DeJoy. It's almost as if he doesn't care about the Democratic Party winning.

[SnowLabrador]

The problem with analyzing or overinterpreting this (other than relying too much on what was always going to be an obvious D advantage in early voting that could also just be a cannibalization of D voters) is that it tells us nothing about whether Youngkin has made dramatic inroads into Democratic communities/rapidly D-trending areas. "High turnout in Richmond metro/outer NoVA" doesn’t mean much if McAuliffe's doing 15 points worse than Biden in these counties. "High turnout" in D/R areas isn’t good per se if the new/energized voters are likely to turn out against your party (also what happened in 2020 in IA/MT/Miami-Dade/etc.).

Sure, but there is no proof that Youngkin is actually doing this. Nor is there proof that Ds are cannibalizing their vote any more than Rs are, since more Rs than usual are also early voting.

Eh, I think there's a good chance that NoVA 2021 is Miami-Dade 2020.

[SnowLabrador]

The problem with analyzing or overinterpreting this (other than relying too much on what was always going to be an obvious D advantage in early voting that could also just be a cannibalization of D voters) is that it tells us nothing about whether Youngkin has made dramatic inroads into Democratic communities/rapidly D-trending areas. "High turnout in Richmond metro/outer NoVA" doesn’t mean much if McAuliffe's doing 15 points worse than Biden in these counties. "High turnout" in D/R areas isn’t good per se if the new/energized voters are likely to turn out against your party (also what happened in 2020 in IA/MT/Miami-Dade/etc.).

Sure, but there is no proof that Youngkin is actually doing this. Nor is there proof that Ds are cannibalizing their vote any more than Rs are, since more Rs than usual are also early voting.

Eh, I think there's a good chance that NoVA 2021 is Miami-Dade 2020.

Why?

If polling is any indication, it seems that the astroturfed culture wars are working.

[SnowLabrador]

FWIW, TargetEarly estimates that the early/mail vote so far is

Dems 463K (54.0%)
Reps 264K (30.7%)
Unaffiliated 132K (15.3%)
= 858K

https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/g2021?state=VA

(looks like they're a day behind)

My guess is that's far from an insurmountable hill for Youngkin to climb on Election Day.