The first votes of the 2024 presidential election are rolling in, raising questions about what can be gleaned from the data in forecasting the possible outcome of the race.
Almost all states and Washington, D.C., have begun some mail-in or early in-person voting and releasing information on the number of ballots returned, the first actual data from the race itself. The states release how many ballots they have received, allowing comparisons to past elections, and many of them also share how many members of each party have cast ballots.
But some experts caution against extrapolating too much from the data given several unknown variables and the uniqueness of the last presidential election.
“It’s fair to make some observations, but it’s too early to make conclusions,” said Scott Tranter, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ.
Mail-in and absentee voting has been a regular part of presidential races going back to the Civil War, but the practice has grown in more recent elections of the 21st century. And Democrats have tended to be more naturally prone to voting early, while Republicans have been more likely to vote on Election Day.
The gap was particularly pronounced in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with almost 60 percent of voters for President Biden voting by mail or absentee, compared to about 30 percent of voters for former President Trump, according to Pew Research Center.
But so far, data being released in the main swing states that will likely decide the 2024 election have shown a major uptick in Republicans voting by mail or early in person.
Some caveats of any analyzing of this data include that the fundamentals of each election are........