Common Sense GayLet's be honest. One day of early vote numbers doesn't call an election. But today's pull had two stories I couldn't ignore, and both move in the same direction.
Georgia showed up
Yesterday Georgia had 5,538 early votes on the board. Today it has 380,973. That's what happens when in-person early voting opens in a state where people actually like to vote in person.
On the modeled split, that's 184,574 Republicans and 193,518 Democrats. Georgia doesn't register voters by party, so those numbers are modeled. They aren't hard counts. Before in-person voting opened, Republicans led the tiny mail-ballot sample. Now Democrats are about 2 points ahead on the model, because a lot more people showed up on both sides.
Be serious. Democrats are supposed to run away with the early vote. That's been the playbook for a decade. Instead, on day one of in-person voting in Georgia, Republicans put up more than 180,000 votes and kept it within a couple of points. That's a fight, not a blowout.
Michigan is a coin flip
This is the one I keep coming back to. Look at Michigan's modeled early vote over the last eleven days:
- October 4: Democrats 51.3%, Republicans 46.4%. A 4.9-point gap.
- October 8: Democrats 49.9%, Republicans 48.0%. A 1.9-point gap.
- October 13: Democrats 49.5%, Republicans 48.5%. A 1.0-point gap.
- October 15: Democrats 49.3%, Republicans 48.7%. A 0.6-point gap.
In raw votes, the Democratic edge went from 5,529 ballots on October 8 to 3,194 today. And that happened while Michigan's total early vote nearly doubled, to 573,385. The more Michiganders vote, the tighter it gets. That's not noise. That's a trend.
The hard counts moved too
In the states that actually register voters by party, I'm not using a model. These are hard counts. Republicans went from 27.6% of early ballots yesterday to 28.6% today, and Democrats slipped from 53.2% to 51.3%. Democrats still have a big lead in those states, because mail ballots come in first and Democrats love mail. But the direction matters, and today it went our way.
And Ohio keeps doing Ohio things. Republicans lead the modeled early vote there by almost 44,000 ballots.
What this does and doesn't mean
Come on, I'm not going to oversell it. Party registration and party models tell you who voted, not how they voted. Plenty of Republicans cross over, and plenty of Democrats do too. Early votes aren't counted until Election Day. And Democrats are still ahead nationally in the early vote.
But the momentum is pointing one way. Georgia Republicans showed up in force the moment the doors opened, and Michigan's early vote went from a nearly 5-point Democratic lead to a coin flip in eleven days. If Republicans keep banking votes early, Democrats lose their three-week head start, and that's exactly how we won in 2024.
So don't sit on it. Find your early voting dates, go vote, then text five people and ask when they're going. Watch the numbers move every morning.
I'm your Common Sense Gay.
Sources: state early vote totals and party splits from the Election Data Guy early vote tracker. Georgia, Michigan and Ohio have no party registration, so their splits are modeled. National totals from the UF Election Lab. Daily history on my early vote tracker.