The October Surprise Is ... Women Are Turning Out In Record Numbers

It's increasingly clear that this race is all about who gets their voters to the polls. Plus, more on how the women's vote could be decisive. Plus a female-focused Musical Interlude

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Things Are Tight

Fivethirtyeight.com

Based on the current polling, it’s still too close to call, which makes predicting the outcome next to impossible.

However, there are some interesting data points that shed some light on where things might be headed.

Yesterday, there was an interesting piece from Politico that included numbers on the gender gap in early voting.

Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states.

… In Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, there is at least a 10-point gap between men and women in the early vote, according to POLITICO’s analysis and data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Similar gender data is not available for other battlegrounds, including Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

In 2020, the female share of the electorate was around 52 to 53 percent (depending on which exit pollster you rely on). If you’re Harris, you’d be overjoyed with an electorate of 53% women because a) not only does it match Biden’s 2020 total, when he won by 4.5 points, but also b) Harris will likely have a larger advantage with women this election.

To be sure, it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to draw too much of a conclusion from this data. The 55% number only includes a handful of states, so it’s difficult to extrapolate for the entire country. Also, it’s difficult to say whether the early voting gender breakdown is emblematic of how a state will vote overall. Just because 55 percent of the current electorate in Michigan is women doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

But then again, close to 2.2 million people have voted in Michigan, around 38 percent of the 2020 turnout (5.5 million people voted in Michigan in 2020). So, this is a relatively large sample. The bottom line is that if the female share of the electorate is around 54 or 55 percent, Harris is a good bet to win. If it’s closer to 2020’s 52 or 53%, she’s in for a long night/week on Tuesday.

One More Thing …

Shutterstock

Here’s one more piece of interesting data from Politico.

POLITICO’s analysis of early voting data in Pennsylvania found that women registered as Democrats made up nearly a third of early votes this year from people who did not vote in the state in 2020.

Remember that around 43 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate are Democrats, so this number should be in the low 20s. Moreover, Republicans have narrowed the registration gap in the state over the past several years. Granted, the number of people who didn’t vote in 2020 and are voting this year is likely pretty small. But still, it’s one more data point that suggests women voters are energized and voting in significant numbers.

And Yet Another One More Thing …

So here’s something else from Pennsylvania that is very interesting.

Early voting in the state is far more Republican this year than in 2020, which is not at all unexpected. Four years ago, Republicans eschewed mail-in voting and mostly voted on Election Day. Democrats still have a 24-point advantage in early voting, but that edge was 47 points in 2020.

Yet, even though early voting is more Republican, the gender gap is largely unchanged (from Jay Kuo’s excellent Substack).

Jay Kuo

One would expect that a nearly 20-point shift in early voting would lead to a more male electorate … but the swing is only 1.2 points. Two things are likely happening here: Democratic women are turning out in huge numbers (see the item above about non-2020 voters), but so are Republican women. The nightmare scenario for Trump is that the latter group includes Haley primary voters crossing the aisle to vote for Harris.

It’s yet another indication that the gender gap in this election is significant and already evident in the early voting.

I suggest reading Jay’s entire post and subscribing to his newsletter. He’s seeing a similar phenomenon with female voters in North Carolina.

Turnout. Turnout. Turnout

There’s an old cliche in political circles that when it comes to elections … it’s all about turnout. Rarely is that more true than this presidential cycle.