Sorry I didn’t get to this yesterday. Too damn much news. Here we go.
Year Mail Early Total
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2012 5,875 6,317 12,192
2016 8,167 10,231 18,398
2020 13,793 17,735 31,528
2024 4,447 17,897 22,344
2012 12,450 13,464 25,914
2016 11,085 14,869 25,954
2020 13,944 16,856 30,800
2024 3,119 22,433 25,552
As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Three totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.
One point to note, the 2012 primary was that weird one that happened in May because of the litigation over the redistricting maps. Because it was in May, the first week of early voting did not start with a holiday, so the 2012 totals through that first Thursday are actually for four days, not three. Going forward, add one more day for 2012 and you’ll be in the right place. As you can see, at least from the Dem perspective it didn’t matter that much.
Dems are now ahead of the 2016 pace and behind in 2020, though the latter is almost entirely because of the difference in mail votes. Dems cast 22,785 mail votes as of the last day of EV in 2020, out of 38,667 mail ballots sent. A total of 23,849 mail ballots have been sent this year, so expect the gap between the two years to remain wide, though perhaps a little less so as we go on. On the Republican side, well, they don’t do much mail anymore.
Mail ballots and the relative lack of them on the GOP side are an item that Derek Ryan addresses in his first statewide early vote report, which covers the first two days. The lack of a real statewide (non-Presidential) primary on that side probably contributes to that, but the change in behavior pushed by you-know-who is I think the main factor.
I voted yesterday, at the SPJST Lodge, which was not a new location for me but one that made sense given the way my day was going. Have you voted yet? If not, when do you plan to?