“Or are they reversed? In 2016, in a lot of cases, they were reversed. “The open question that won’t be answered until : Do those early vote trends carry on through Election Day?” Bonier asked. But even this does not guarantee electoral success for Democrats on Tuesday. Mara Suttmann, a professor of government at Connecticut College, noted that it’s hard to predict which party will benefit from early voting because many voters would have voted whether or not early voting was an option - “cannibalizing” the Election Day vote instead of adding many new voters to the electorate.īonier noted that there has been in a surge in non-usual voters, including young people and people voting for the first time, which could favor Democrats. Higher-than-expected turnout helped Democrats in some but not all of the Times/Siena polling models. (Another 7 percent of the district’s population is in another county that has not published early vote totals by congressional seat.) Over 188,000 voters have cast early ballots in the Dallas County portion of the battleground district, according to county data. Pete Sessions’ (R-Texas) contested reelection race, for example, projected that about 194,000 people would turn out, while the second poll projected 211,000 voters would cast ballots in that slice of the Dallas suburbs. And the baseline estimates have gone up in recent weeks: The first Times/Siena poll of Rep. Some pollsters, like Monmouth University and The New York Times/Siena College, have adjusted this year by publishing multiple results for each poll, detailing how the results would change under different turnout scenarios. “I think we’ve all made a very safe assumption that 2018 will look nothing like 2014,” Bonier said, noting that underestimating certain demographics by even a few percentage points in a poll could have outsize effects on the results. That’s up from 2014, an unusually low-turnout year in which fewer than 82 million people voted for the highest office on their ballot, but still lower than 2016, when about 137 million people voted for president. McDonald and the team at Edison Media Research, which is conducting a revamped exit poll this election after stumbling in 2016, predict that 105.5 million people will vote this year - about 45 percent of the voting eligible population. But they did note that pre-election polls make built-in assumptions about how many people will vote, and pollsters who leaned too heavily on past midterm turnout may have misfired. Tom Bonier, CEO of the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, projected that early voting could surpass 40 million when all the ballots are received.Īnalysts cautioned against drawing broad conclusions about which party could gain an advantage from the high early-vote totals. McDonald predicted that by the time all the early votes are compiled, every state could surpass its 2014 totals. “The best guess is that we’re looking at some sort of hybrid midterm/presidential election” in terms of turnout. “This is not a normal election,” McDonald told POLITICO. The high voting rates have transformed expectations about who will show up in the midterms - and they could inspire results that diverge from any pre-election polls that did not reckon with this year’s unusually high enthusiasm. Early voters in three states - Texas, Nevada and Arizona - have surpassed total turnout in the most recent midterm election, McDonald’s data show, and more states will blow past their normal non-presidential turnout with just a handful more votes on Election Day. And that trend was expected to extend into Election Day.
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