Really difficult for analysts to decipher early voting this year....seems to be a lot of disagreement.
Target (Tom Bonier) enthusiastically interprets early WI vote being favorable to the dems:
“295,973 votes have been cast by voters in Wisconsin who didn’t vote in the ‘16 general election. They account for 27% of all early votes cast. Democrats have a modeled party ID lead of 17% with these surge voters, as compared to a lead of only 1% with those who did vote in ‘16.”
But I have to wonder if he isn’t doing an apple vs. orange comparison. Since vbm in WI this year to date is 6 times the rate of early in person voting and polls show that vbm is heavily weighted with dems because reps intend to vote on election day I don’t think you can draw his conclusion based on this.
And Robert Cahaly (Trafalgar) sees an overall big increase this time in low propensity (only voted once or twice in past 20) voters which is going strongly to Trump.
And an experienced campaign data strategist sees the early MI vote this way:
“So many people are changing their voting behavior by voting early for the first time. Does not appear that there are a lot of new/lower propensity voters showing up on the dem side, Newly registered new voters that have already voted are Trump +17 which is a slightly stronger spot than this time 4 yrs. ago.
FL GOP IPEV advantage up to 191K.
One of the “gang” noted that TargetSmart changed their “modeling” for WI/OH/MI making it more favorable to Dems. They changed in the middle of the election. Tweeted out they were making a change. Maybe a week or so ago.
I think the net result was alot of R modeled voters being move to the Unaffiliated group.
I don’t think they liked Rs pointing to their data positively.
They are a D firm.