On average, the D less R margin in the early vote mispredicted the final Clinton/Trump margin by 14 points! Pollsters get yelled at when their polls are off by even 3 points, and anything more than that is considered an absolute disaster. Imagine if a poll was off by 14 points: no one would ever listen to it again! And yet we get the same frankly amateurish analysis of the early vote in every election.
No offense but wtf Nate? Why would you use 2016 data when early voting was massively expanded since 2020?
He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything
Not just COVID, Trump’s main strategy in 2020 was to turn “taking the pandemic seriously” into a partisan issue in order to make it so early and mail voting become disproportionately blue (there was no significant correlation in the past) while poisoning the well on those ballots’ legitimacy.
Yeah, but have we really returned to what 2016 was like? This is the issue with a lot of analysis like this, lots of internal bias in the underlying approach.
He could very well be right, but it’s just as likely we’re closer to 2020 than 2016. I know a lot of people that have gone to full mail-in-ballot (since covid) and I know others concerned the mail-is will be tampered with (given some have been set on fire). Not sure either of those things were in play back in 2016.
I think that’s sort of the point - if 2016 was our last “normal” election and early voting wasn’t prognosticative of election results then, there’s no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.
The point wasn’t about a “return to normal” or else he would be saying it was an indicator.