Nate Silver: "Early Voter ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Appears Consistent With Polls"

Early Voter ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Appears Consistent With Polls
October 24, 2010, 9:58 PM
By NATE SILVER

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about early voting data, which is already available in a number of states. In most parts of the country, indeed, a voter is already able to cast a ballot if she wants do.

This early voting data is very attractive in one way: since many states track the number of early voters by political party, it reflects the first ‘hard’ evidence we have about the turnout of actual voters in this year’s elections. Those of you who don’t trust the turnout estimates that pollsters are coming up with might therefore be especially fond of it.

I would, however, urge some caution when reading articles about these early voting statistics. Like most other types of political data, they can be prone to either misinterpretation or to ’spin’.

First, early patterns seem to differ a lot from state to state this year — with Republicans posting terrific numbers in some states at the same time Democrats do surprisingly well in others. So there tends to be some cherry-picking in the analysis of results: Democrats, for instance, might point to their numbers in Iowa and Ohio, which are good, and Republicans theirs in Florida or Pennsylvania.

Second — even if we know how many people in each party have cast ballots so far — it’s not clear what the point of comparison ought to be to be. Is the benchmark supposed to be 2008, when Democrats put a ton of emphasis on early voting? (If so, this year’s numbers look really good so far for Republicans.) Or is then benchmark the years prior to 2008, when the conventional wisdom held that older voters — who are more likely to be Republican — were most inclined to vote early or by mail? Is the idea that, because Republicans are apparently more fired up in this election, they ought to be doing especially well among early voters? Or can the number of early voters be taken more or less at face value in terms of predicting the eventual turnout? Articles grounded in different assumptions about the comparisons may come to very different conclusions about what the early voting data implies.

That said, I do think there is some value in looking at the early voting numbers. And they seems to point toward an enthusiasm gap that is broadly consistent with what the pollsters are seeing.

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Overall, however, the early voting data does not provide compelling reason to reject the consensus among pollsters, which is that the enthusiasm gap is most likely to manifest itself in a mid-to-high single digit turnout advantage for Republicans. When coupled with the edge that Republican candidates have among independent voters in most races, this suggests that they are liable to have a pretty good year.

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http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/early-voter-enthusiasm-gap-appears-consistent-with-polls/