KNOWN UNKNOWNS — On election eve, campaign operatives and political hobbyists are parsing what limited voting data we have — largely from the over 78 million early votes that have been cast — in an attempt to figure out who’s going to win the White House Tuesday. What they’ve concluded is wildly different, depending on whom you’re listening to. Republicans and their allies argue that since they are turning out voters at a much more robust clip than in previous cycles, Election Day will be a far steeper climb than usual for Democrats. It’s a sign of through-the-roof enthusiasm, they say, underscored by the fact that urban turnout is down while rural turnout is up — a portent of good fortunes for the GOP. For their part, Democrats argue that the fundamentals of the early vote totals have changed, making those advances a zero sum game, Republicans are cannibalizing their past strength on Election Day by turning out early, and moreover, some of the fundamentals — like the number of women who are voting early — points towards success for Kamala Harris. Neither can be taken exactly at face value; the early vote neither tells us which candidate people are voting for (just their party registration) nor is it a good sample of the electorate. Still, there are ways in which the early vote data — combined with other information that we already know about the race — can help to make a deeply muddy picture slightly clearer. Here are the three big things the early vote is telling us: There’s a big gender gap in the early vote: Republicans largely are projecting confidence about their early vote performance, which across swing states looks a lot better than in 2020. What they’re concerned about is the gender gap. Polling shows that women largely support Harris while men largely support Trump, and that the gender gap is wider than in past cycles. An analysis of the early vote from POLITICO last week found a 10-point gender gap in early voting in battleground states, with 55 percent of the early vote coming from women and 45 percent coming from men. This disparity was a red flag for conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, whose organization Turning Point USA has been key to Trump’s get out the vote campaign. He wrote on October 30, “Early vote has been disproportionately female. If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.” Women outvoted men in the early vote at a similar clip in 2020 as well. But if the gender gap has truly widened, then this early vote margin could be a good sign for Harris. Yet this morsel of information about the gender gap shouldn’t be treated as gospel — it’s entirely possible that women are just voting earlier than men, cannibalizing their Election Day totals, and men will show up on Tuesday to deliver a victory to Trump. Still, the reason it’s potentially useful to consider is that it aligns with what we know about past voting behavior and what the polls tell us about voter preferences this year. Young men in particular are much more pro-Trump than their female counterparts, but they’re also statistically the least motivated demographic of voters. Rural voters make up a larger slice of the early vote than in 2020: A memo that the Trump campaign blasted out today lays out why they think the early vote is a harbinger of a successful night. According to the campaign’s argument, the combination of early vote gains in rural areas — and the lagging early vote numbers in urban areas — signals far more enthusiasm for Donald Trump among one of his core constituencies and less excitement within a critical Democratic constituency. This is particularly true in Georgia, where the early vote out of urban areas has decreased by over 150,000 votes while the rural turnout has increased by over 170,000 votes. Yet Democratic strategist Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, who produced that data, says that the Trump campaign has mischaracterized it because the 2020 to 2024 comparison is not a good benchmark for comparison. Why? Because the 2020 election was in many respects an outlier due to COVID, making it a deeply imperfect point of comparison for 2024. What’s undeniable, however, is that Republicans are voting early at higher rates than they did in 2020. Data gathered by CNN, Edison Research and Catalyst shows that early voters are older, slightly more likely to be white and more Republican than last cycle. In part, this is a clear response to Trump’s own rhetoric — while he told his supporters to wait for Election Day to cast their votes in 2020, this time around he’s asking them to vote early. But there’s some reason to believe that the early vote numbers could portend good fortune for Republicans. Republicans are probably cannibalizing their Election Day vote, to some extent: The Democratic rejoinder to Republican triumphalism about the early vote in the swing states is that these are reliable Republican voters who have simply changed their voting behavior compared to 2020. Their increased share of the early vote will lead to a decreased share of the Election Day vote. Consider Pennsylvania. In 2020, Democrats had an over 40-point advantage in the early vote totals over Republicans. This year, that’s down to 24 points. That’s still a significant firewall that Republicans have to overcome. By eating into the Democratic early vote advantage, the mountain is smaller. But now, Republicans have a different concern — that they won’t have enough Election Day votes this year to overcome that diminished Democratic advantage. We won’t know until the polls close in Pennsylvania tomorrow evening. What’s certain is that Republicans have taken a big step toward addressing their early vote deficit. The bigger question, however, remains unanswered: How likely to show up on Election Day are the lower propensity voters that Trump is reliant on? Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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