VA Early Voting #s

[ElectionsGuy]

This stuff is just really inconclusive. Compared to 2020, far less early votes, but also the pandemic has receded since then with vaccines and Virginia was never a big early vote state before that. So we can't just say that's necessarily bad for Democrats. As we know, the same pattern of Dems disproportionately voting early and R's voting on election day is going to continue, so that needs to be kept in mind in all early voting data. So we do know that more early vote (particularly mail-in) = better for Democrats and more election day = better for Republicans, we just don't know how Republican the election day is going to break given many Democrats who voted mail/early last year will probably vote on election day this year.

[ElectionsGuy]

Using the answer to Question 16 of the Monmouth poll and the number of early votes cast by October 18th, if accurate, would lead to roughly 3.3 million votes.

[ElectionsGuy]

Just did another rough calculation.

If the 3.3 million turnout that I rough estimated before is roughly correct, given the ratio of early/election day vote was 39/61 in the answer, we'd expect about 1.3 million of those votes to be early, and 2 million to be election day.

But let's say it's a little lower turnout, like 3.1. Then they need roughly 1.2 million early votes. Again, this is all predicated on that answer to the Monmouth poll which for all we know could be inaccurate, I just think this is an interesting exercise. However, if they don't get up to at least 1 million, they better hope the poll overestimated the percentage of people voting on election day. The poll shows roughly double the number of people are going to vote early in the next week and a half as have so far. So we should see early votes coming in at a more rapid clip especially next week Monday-Friday.

[ElectionsGuy]

Looking at the early voting numbers, either the polls are headed for a huge miss, or election day turnout, especially in much of rural VA is going to be massive.

Or... the polls can be accurate too. This early voting data is not really telling much of a story. If anything, I expected much more early vote by now.

Is the premise here that the early vote total is "large" and therefore good for Democrats? How did we go through 2020 and still we can't comprehend how Dem skewed the early vote is and how R-skewed the election day vote is? That pattern is going to continue.

[ElectionsGuy]

Looking at the early voting numbers, either the polls are headed for a huge miss, or election day turnout, especially in much of rural VA is going to be massive.

Or... the polls can be accurate too. This early voting data is not really telling much of a story. If anything, I expected much more early vote by now.

Is the premise here that the early vote total is "large" and therefore good for Democrats? How did we go through 2020 and still we can't comprehend how Dem skewed the early vote is and how R-skewed the election day vote is? That pattern is going to continue.

My point is that if the polls are accurate, I would expect massive ED turnout, especially in more Republican areas of the state, which would offset the early vote.

Well, I think you can expect that given we know large majorities of Republicans vote on election day, and Trump was completely counted out last year by the folks who were too deep into early voting statistics.

Also, a few Virginia polls I've seen so far indicate about 40% of the electorate is voting early. If that's the case... The Dems should want 2017 turnout or lower, otherwise it looks to be below that.