Yesterday the FiveThirtyEight Podcast cast its eye on California for a look at the early recall vote and polling, with me and CalMatters political reporter Laurel Rosenhall on the show.

You can check out the podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-a-9-11-era-political-consensus-seems-impossible/id1077418457?i=1000534629618 or watch the video here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/. We are in the second half. Apologies in advance to any bad pollsters or fans of Applebee’s.

One topic on the show was if there would be a surprise in the later ballots to be cast. As I mentioned in my Saturday email, our first look at the in-person voting will come today as we receive and process the votes cast in-person at the states thousands of vote centers that began over the weekend. One could suppose that if the Republican surge was to come, it would be seen in these first large-scale in-person opportunities.

From the data we received, we can drill into the early vote from this weekend in LA and Orange County to look for any differences between the in-person voting and those ballots received by mail. These are the kind of numbers we were expecting:

Los Angeles:

Mailed Ballots: 63% Dem/15% Rep

In Person: 40% Dem / 37% Rep

Orange County:

Mailed Ballots: 41% Dem/35% Rep

In Person: 19% Dem / 64% Rep

In LA, this shows that Democrats are outpacing Republicans in early vote by nearly 40-points, but the in-person shows that dropping to just 3-points. In Orange County, Democrats lead in the mailed in ballots by 6-points, but in-person was dominated by Republicans, giving them a 45-point advantage among those voters.

What really is surprising then, given these percentages, is just how the turnout for this past weekend, including both mail-in and in-person votes statewide, really didn’t break for Republicans overall – it broke for Democrats. And we saw a little bump up for Latinos (the yellow line).


The reason Democrats did better over the weekend, despite the big Republican close with in-person voting is that in-person votes are only a small share of the total ballots cast.

The combined number of in-person ballots we received by these two counties was just 20,000, which is paltry compared to the over 200,000 total ballots reported by the two counties during the same period. Essentially, Republicans are cashing in on the in-person voting, roughly doubling their share of the electorate. But that’s less than a 10% slice of the electorate.

We always have to be cautious about reading too much into one report, but for the recall proponents, they were probably marking today on the calendar as a key point for the election to start turning around. And the more days that tick by, the harder it gets to change these turnout numbers.

Get today’s PDF here: https://www.dropbox.com/t/FtdLdR46qJ3utqif or check out the tracker on the website at https://www.politicaldata.com/2021-special-election-tracker/.

If you’re forwarding this to others, they can subscribe to receive these morning updates here: https://www.politicaldata.com/2021-election-tracker-email-signup/

Thanks,

Paul



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Paul Mitchell
Vice-President
Political Data