Final November 2024 early voting: Definitely short

Early voting is done, and I have to say, we didn’t get to where I expected we would:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after eight days of early voting are

Mail = 57,059
In Person = 1,175,901
Total = 1,232,960

I thought we’d get at least 200K votes cast on the last days but instead we got 130,717, of which 127,930 were in person. The early total is not only well short of the 1,435,221 total early votes from 2020, it’s short of the 1,264,811 votes cast in person. We did average 97,992 in person votes per day, which is well above the 70,227 in person day rate from 2020, but those six extra days more than made up for it.

I’m really not sure what to make of this. We need about 420K votes on Tuesday to match the overall turnout from 2020. That feels like a stretch but it isn’t impossible. We had over 400K votes cast on Election Day in 2008 and 2012. I admit that feels like another era, but it still means that about 74% of the vote was cast early. That’s a small uptick from 2016, so not really an outlier. I guess the question is, did the conditions in 2020 – COVID, the extra week of early voting, the push for mail ballots, the convenience of drive-through voting, the urgency of ejecting Trump – mostly change people’s behavior in terms of when and how they voted, or did they also get people out to vote who wouldn’t have voted otherwise and thus maybe aren’t bothering this year?

My gut says it’s more the former than the latter, but I’ve been led astray before. I also don’t have the data on how many old reliable voters there are out there who are waiting for Tuesday. The regular voters who haven’t shown up yet, I expect them to turn out. The rest, I have no idea. Did you vote differently – mail versus in person, early versus Election Day, drive through versus anything else – in 2020 than this year? Let us know about it in the comments. And as the man once said, hold onto your butts.

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2 Responses to Final November 2024 early voting: Definitely short

  1. J says:

    Please consider saving your butt while holding onto it. If the orange atrocity gets into office, his goons may carry out the plan to do wholesale detention of those without papers. Who then will pick the produce, staff the meat packing plants, and build the houses? There will be shortages galore, bad inflation especially at the grocery store, and enormous economic disruption, for a start. This is why major financial figures like Michael Bloomberg and the editor of The Economist are backing Harris.

    This should be enough reason for you to back Harris if you are a straight white male. If you are not a straight white male then you have a target on your back and voting for Democrats should be a no-brainer. Time to save your butt and everyone else’s, too.

  2. Andrew Lynch says:

    Mail in ballots from 250K in 2020 to 57K in 2024 is a big change.

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