There’s a reason why the Pennsylvania Senate debate is happening in late October. It’s not only because Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is struggling mightily on the stump trying to string coherent sentences together. Democrats also wanted to delay this debate for as long as possible to prevent any hiccups regarding early voting, where Democrats hold the edge. It’s a somewhat moot point in the race since Fetterman’s double-digit lead over the summer has been all but erased. Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz has clawed back, hitting Fetterman’s soft-on-crime record when the state is experiencing a crime spike, especially in Philadelphia. The state legislature is mulling an impeachment vote against the city’s district attorney, whom Fetterman had endorsed. The conditions on the ground are so poor for Democrats that the PA suburbs are reportedly in play.
We have an economic recession and high inflation that’s torching the bank accounts of working Americans. Still, even if these conditions were absent, the liberal media and the Democratic Party’s obsession with early voting is fool’s gold.
Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics took a katana to this annoying narrative since it’s the quintessential smoke and mirrors story of any election cycle. So what if Democrats own early voting trends? Democrats know that Republicans could blow the hinges off those figures if they get more people to vote on Election Day. Often, the early-voting champagne celebrations are later supplemented with casks of whiskey to soothe the feeling of misery. Trende’s point is two-fold. One, he cites the North Carolina early voting numbers showing Democrats with a 10-point lead, which is good but also three points less than their 2016 total—and they also lost the state to Trump and the Republicans that year. The second and most crucial point is this: it’s not news [emphasis mine]:
The problem today is the same as it was back then. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll summarize my basic argument from four years ago: Unless you somehow know what is going to happen on Election Day, this argument is useless. To take an extreme example: Democrats could turn out every one of their voters early, and Republicans could still win the election by turning out more on Election Day.
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Because we don’t have a lengthy history of good research giving our brains guidance for how to interpret early returns, it’s very easy to see what you want to see. For example, we can look at North Carolina, and see that Democrats have a 10.5-percentage-point lead over Republicans in early voting. That seems great for Democrats.
But we could also contextualize this by noting that at a similar point in 2016, Democrats had a 13.1-percentage-point lead there in early voting. In other words, Democrats are doing worse than they were at this point four years ago (and much worse than they were in 2012). Actually, with a week to go early voting is looking about the same as it did at the end of 2016 (when Democrats had a 9.8-percentage-point lead at the end), and that wasn’t a great year for them. For that matter, African American voters were 22% of the early electorate in 2016; at this point they are 20.5% of the electorate. That’s probably not what we would expect in a Democratic wave year when Republicans are being encouraged to vote on Election Day and Democrats are supposedly avoiding it.
You can see similar stories developing in Florida and Nevada, where you can make a case that things look roughly the same as they did about a week out from Election Day in 2016.
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The claim is not “the early vote actually is good news for Republicans.” The point is “the early vote is not even news.” We don’t know in these states what share of Republicans, Democrats, or independents are voting for Republicans or Democrats, and we don’t know how many voters for any party are going to end up voting on Nov. 3. This is all speculation dressed up as news. We’ve waited this long for actual election returns; we can wait eight more days.
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So, if there’s one story or chyron you should 100 percent ignore on Election Day, it’s the liberals going ga-ga over early voting numbers. They’re bound to be scratched out.
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