With a week to go before the November General Election, data collected on absentee ballot returns is finally giving us a story that confirms the conventional political wisdom: turnout will be low.
Our Absentee Ballot Tracking Worksheet, with more than 12,000 views since its inception, can show these trends visually, with a breakout of partisanship, ethnicity and age, along with a comparison to the same measures for past General Elections.
This shows statewide totals, but using the pulldown can take the user to any legislative, congressional district, county, or a few major cities with competitive local elections this year.
For the first several days of Absentee Ballot Returns, the numbers were tracking ahead of the 2010 election – both in raw numbers, and in percentage of outstanding absentee ballots available. The raw number is still tracking, but as a percentage of potential absentee voters, the numbers are slipping. The percentage of Absentee Voters turning in their ballot was ahead of 2010 by just a percentage point after the first 10 days, but with 8 days to go, 2014 has slipped 5% behind 2010.
While the raw turnout is important to some campaigns, it alone is not decisive. What can be decisive is the partisan, ethnic, and age voting patterns that come along with low turnout elections. Traditionally, the narrower electorate is older, more affluent, and shares ethnic/partisan traits with those on that end of the spectrum.
Campaigns around the state are using the AV Tracking tool to get a sense of where they stand going into Election Day. Are they seeing the rates of returns for their partisan voters, or are they seeing the quantity of returns they expected given the amount of outreach they have done to different parts of the electorate?
And, as always, PDI is the only data vendor in the country that has this kind of detail about voters and can help you target the remaining voters going into the last days before the election. Please contact us if there is anything we can do.