Edits by Andrew Donaldson
Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! I’m still recovering from the trip to Georgia. Will post some stray thoughts later today. Reminder that tomorrow is the first Media Offender Mailbag for paid subscribers.
With less than a week to go until the midterms, almost everyone is losing their patience and looking for any potential indication of how the election will go.
As voters are casting their ballots in-person in numerous swing states before election day, politics junkies are following almost every state that has early voting religiously to find any sign of how the winds will blow.
“We’re getting close to election day, and then people really want to glean anything they can,” Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, who breaks down early voting data, told The Political Spectrum. “We’ve been seeing polls for five or six months. Now we’re actually seeing actual votes cast, and it’s a different type of data.”
All of this is understandable. Democrats hope that heavy early voting numbers mean their base is excited to vote for their candidates and kick out Republicans. President Donald Trump has criticized early voting, Still, early voting does not offer a definitive answer about how the election will turn out.
“What can’t we learn is how the final election is going to break out,” Armin Thomas, a co-founder of Split Ticket, said. Thomas regularly posts summaries on X breaking down early voting data from Texas ahead of the high-profile race for Senate between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton.
But not all early voting data is created equal and sometimes, people vote for both a Democrat and a Republican, as was the case in 2024 when North Carolina voted for Trump for president but elected Democrat Josh Stein to be governor.
“You cannot predict that in advance just from looking at who is turning out,” Thomas said. He pointed to Donnini. “It doesn’t tell you prescriptively that something will happen. It’ll tell you that something definitely won’t happen.”
States like North Carolina, Florida and California have voters’ party affiliation in their voter files. But other southern states like Texas and Georgia do not show a voter’s party registration.
“That’s why I’ve been so meticulous and diligent about only speaking about what I can directly confirm myself,” he said.
The same goes for Donnini, who pointed to the fact that early voting can track turnout among voters’ bases, but not necessarily persuasion. He used Georgia as an example, saying that the current electorate turning out would likely back Kamala Harris. But that does not mean Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, will lose.
“It just makes it a little bit harder for him, he just needs to get more people to split their tickets for Jon Ossoff and Rick Jackson,” he said.
The same is true in a place like the heavily Hispanic South Texas. Despite Texas not registering by party, Texas voting data shows whether someone cast their ballot in a Democratic or Republican primary. But plenty of voters cast their primary ballots in the Democratic primary, but do not vote for Democrats in the general. Thomas said that he has used Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, to create an algorithm to examine at the last three election primary and general election cycles.
“We are trying to model the 2024 recall of people that voted,” he said. “Because we can’t directly measure the persuasion today.”
And lest Republicans cry foul about early voting, Donnini said that Republicans have shown they can succeed in early voting.
“Republicans proved right that ‘we can do this too, we can get our voters out, and we can lead on that,” he said.
And even in Republican-held states, early voting is here to stay. This means that people will pore over and analyze the data for decades to come.
What I’m listening to: Ezra Klein’s interview with Nate Silver in The New York Times. Silver goes into some of the things I’ve been feeling about polling this cycle.
What I’m reading: Western Carolina University Professor Chris Cooper Anatomy of a Purple State Substack has a great breakdown of what is a dummymander and whether North Carolina Republicans did one. Jake Lahut’s profile of Lauren Boebert in New York magazine. I’ve long believed Boebert is vulnerable, and this profile delves into why while debunking some of the most tawdry allegations. Nick Miroff in The Atlantic on how Republicans lost the “big-ass truck” Latino male vote.
That does it for this edition of The Political Spectrum. Hit subscribe below.
Your regular Bam Bam photo.
I do know one Democrat who voted in the Republican primary to try to get Paxton as Talarico's opponent because he would be easier to beat. I thought that was a risky idea, but so be it.