Early voting is underway in Nevada, and the numbers look bad for Democrats. Republicans and Democrats have voted in nearly equal numbers in Clark County, home to Las Vegas, where Democrats have a 13-point registration advantage. Only 10,000 voters have turned out, compared with 17,000 who turned out on the first day of 2010.
Nevada isn’t alone. The early voting numbers, a possible indicator of overall turnout, also look bad for Democrats in Ohio.
Fortunately for Democrats, Nevada doesn’t really matter. Neither does Ohio. There isn’t a Senate race in Nevada or Ohio, and the states’ Republican governors are expected to cruise to re-election.
So why am I bringing up the gloomy numbers for Democrats in irrelevant contests for them? Because they highlight the challenge of interpreting early voting data elsewhere.
Very few of this year’s competitive contests had close races in 2010. Colorado and Florida are notable exceptions, but Iowa, North Carolina and Georgia didn’t have especially competitive statewide contests four years ago.
That’s made it difficult to interpret the early voting numbers in these states. Democrats have emphasized that they’re turning out voters who didn’t participate in 2010. But the better question, and one that’s harder to know, is whether the new voters talked up by Democrats are people who would have participated in 2010 if the states had been competitive. If that’s it, I don’t see how it’s amazing news for Democrats.
The conventional wisdom is that Democrats need to outdo their mobilization efforts of four years ago, when they lost competitive contests in Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois. If that’s right, then Democrats don’t just need voters who didn’t participate in 2010; they need people who wouldn’t have participated in a hypothetically competitive race in 2010.
Midterm Elections 2014
The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.
The Nevada and Ohio numbers help clarify this analytical conundrum because the two states are the opposite of this year’s contests. Nevada and Ohio were two of the most high-profile contests of 2010. Mostly because these states are now noncompetitive, early voting has plummeted. The big drop-offs highlight that, even in 2010, Democrats were mobilizing large numbers of voters who wouldn’t have participated in a less competitive contest.
Or put another way: There’s nothing about new Democratic voters in Iowa that proves the Democrats are better at mobilizing voters in the battleground states than they were four years ago.
This is why I am more interested in the early voting numbers from Colorado, the only one of this year’s Senate battlegrounds that was truly competitive four years ago. If the electorate looks about the same as it did in 2010, that will be cause to question whether Democrats are doing a better job of mobilizing voters than in 2010. If they’re outperforming their tallies from 2010, then that might really tell us something — although the new voting system there that gives every registered voter a mail-in ballot will complicate the comparison. I’ll come back to that when we get some numbers.
The Upshot
In a weekly e-mail newsletter, get the best of The Upshot's analysis about politics, policy and everyday life.