The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump just unleashed a series of urgent calls to Republican voters, ordering them to vote early in huge numbers and urging them especially to vote by mail. Which is funny, because he previously spent months claiming mail voting is fraudulent to push voter suppression efforts.
In effect, Trump just admitted his attacks on mail voting have been a scam all along, designed to help him rig the election. On top of all that, Trump has badly self-owned here by spending months discouraging Republicans from voting by mail, which he now wants them to do.
So what can we say right now about early voting, both in person and by mail? We’re talking about this with one of the foremost trackers of early voting out there, Professor Michael McDonald, who runs the University of Florida Election Lab. Michael, great to have you on.
Michael McDonald: Great to be with you.
Sargent: So Trump spent many months calling vote by mail “corrupt” and “horrible” and worse. Suddenly he unleashes all these tweets directed at a number of states in which he says this:
“If you have a mail-in ballot, return it immediately and, if not, GO VOTE at the Polls RIGHT NOW. Get everyone you know to VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICAN! Whether you VOTE early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, Republicans must SWAMP the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!
Michael, what do you make of that? It sure seems like Trump kind of screwed himself, doesn’t it?
McDonald: Yeah. And it’s really too late, really, for Republicans to be requesting mail ballots. The Postal Service recommends 10 days to have election mail delivered. And so you’d have to have an election office send you a mail ballot, and you’ve got to return it. And so that may not actually be enough time. So even if, like he’s saying, please do this—it’s just simply not enough time now for Republicans to vote by mail.
Sargent: Well done, Mr. President! I want to clarify for people as well that vote by mail is an essential piece of early voting. In other words, if you want people to vote early, you want them to have the mail option. It’s critical, right?
McDonald: Yeah. And we have states primarily out in the West, but there are others like Vermont and D.C., that have run their elections entirely by mail, in that every active registered voter is sent a mail ballot. So in some places it’s essential that you’re voting by mail. In lots of other places, it’s an option for you to request a mail ballot.
Sargent: OK, so let’s start talking about the current situation. By your count, as of now, more than 16 million people have voted early, and around 10 million of those, more than half, are mail ballots. Is that right? And how does that compare to the previous two midterms?
McDonald: Yes, that’s correct. And while we can’t make really good apples-to-apples comparisons everywhere in the country, where I can make those comparisons, it certainly looks like people are voting at higher rates, maybe even higher than, say, the 2018 election, which was the highest turnout rate election for a midterm election since 1914. So we’re looking at really modern historic rates of voting.
Sargent: So your impression from the early voting data that you’ve collected is that we may be on a pace to actually beat 2018 in turnout in this midterm, right?
McDonald: Yes, it appears, where I can make comparisons to 2018, that turnout is exceeding levels of 2018, which would mean that we are going to have a higher turnout election than 2018.
Sargent: That is really, really striking, because 2018 was a big one.
Let’s start breaking this down by party. What is that 16 million telling you about which party is voting early more and which party is voting by mail more? And what does it mean?
McDonald: Yeah. So in some states that have closed or semi-closed primaries that are restricted to only people who register with the political party, we have data on who’s voting by political party, at least which party they’ve registered with. And when we look at that data, we can see that, well, Democrats, they’re way up from their 2018 and 2020 numbers.
Unaffiliated people, who aren’t affiliated with the party—yeah, they’re up too. You know who’s trailing behind everybody? Republicans. And they’re only up over their previous elections’ turnout in just a couple of states. So it does look like right now that there’s much more enthusiasm on the Democratic side to vote, and even among unaffiliated, than there is among Republicans.
Sargent: Well, let’s just underscore this one more time. Trump told Republican voters not to vote by mail for months and months and months, or even years, right? And so that essentially deprives Republicans of a very critical option to vote early. Isn’t that right?
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s not just the mail ballots. We can see it in the in-person early voting that’s going on too. So it’s just like a general malaise among Republicans to participate in this election. And if the polling is correct that we’re going to see a big wave election, this is very consistent with what we would expect to see.
Sargent: OK. Well, as a quick aside here, people, there’s some new polling out. The New York Times national poll has Democrats up by 11 points, 52 to 41, in the generic House ballot matchup. That is a big lead consistent with a wave.
Right now, Democrats are also slightly up in the polling averages in just about all the key Senate races. These are all close, but Democrats do have a small edge. And this includes in a number of red states that Trump won by double digits.
So, Michael, does what we’re seeing in the early voting look consistent with those polls actually being accurate? Can you explain that?
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just a high-level view on it: the Republicans have basically given up on North Carolina, for example. We already know that they withdrew their support, but the early voting numbers there are just abysmal for them. So it looks like, yes, indeed, like the polling, like the political strategists have already determined, North Carolina is off the board for the Republicans—so that means probably, because, you know, it’s kind of a close competitive state.
When we look at where we may be shifting the battleground to places like Nebraska and Kansas and Iowa, places where we do have party registration data, we can see that, yeah, there’s a lot of engagement among Democrats. It’s relatively more than Republicans.
And that’s, again, both by mail and in person. So it looks like, if those states are going to be competitive, at least the data are there, the votes are there so far, that would make those states competitive.
But I do want to say one other thing about this. It’s definitely not a done deal for Democrats in these states. When you start looking at places—include Maine in this group too—when you look at these competitive—really competitive now according to the polling—U.S. Senate elections, you see Republicans voting there too.
Sargent: I just want to flag one more number from the New York Times national poll. Democrats lead in the generic House ballot matchup by 54 to 35 among independent voters, which is an extraordinary lead. It’s a 19-point lead.
Now, you mentioned earlier in this discussion that independent early voting is way up relative to previous midterms as well. So I think that there’s a positive story in that for Democrats, isn’t there? I mean, if Democrats are winning lopsidedly among independents and independent early voting is up, what does that tell us?
McDonald: Yeah, it’s absolutely what the Democrats are going to need to win some of these red states. They can’t just rely on Democrats or Republicans showing up. Democrats have to rely also on the unaffiliated moving their direction.
But I can’t tell that with the data that I have. I don’t know how people voted. I just have party registration. We have to look at polls to see, you know, give some glimmer of how the independents will be breaking.
Sargent: So if we’ve got independents breaking by, like, 19 points in Democrats’ favor, this doesn’t really necessarily confirm this for certain, but you’re looking like Democrats are really doing quite well among independents, and independents are voting very energetically early, right?
McDonald: Yeah, and it’s really unusual behavior, because usually independents, unaffiliated voters, they vote later in the early voting season, closer to Election Day. So to see these levels up right now, it’s a very unusual pattern.
Sargent: That’s really striking. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what do you take from it? Does it mean maybe that we’re going to see independent turnout kind of off the charts in an overall sense, like in terms of both early voting and Election Day voting?
McDonald: Well, we don’t know yet, right? Because we still have a week and a half yet to go. So that remains to be seen. But what we can see from today, and if these patterns persist throughout the entire election, then yes, that would be the answer.
Again, these are very unusual patterns that we’re seeing, especially where we see Democrats up, unaffiliated up, but Republicans, like, either flatlined or even down in some states. It’s very unusual to see this behavior.
Sargent: Well, let’s dig a little deeper into some of this early voting. The data out of North Carolina and Georgia is telling us something about Latinos as well, right?
McDonald: Yeah, those are two states where they ask race and Latino or Hispanic ethnicity on their voter registration form, and they report the statistics of who’s voted by race and Hispanic ethnicity. And so we actually have some idea there of what’s happening. And I can see in the data highly engaged Latinos.
Their numbers are more than doubled from the previous election cycles. And that’s, again, highly unusual to see this behavior. Now, because Hispanics, Latinos, they tend to vote at a much lower rate than whites and African Americans in a midterm election—now, their rates are still not above whites or African Americans, so a little ways to go here, but still, it’s very encouraging to see this level of participation.
And there are a couple of corollaries that emerge from that. One is that if that’s going on in North Carolina and Georgia, it’s likely going on in other states too. And while we don’t have the data in the same way in Texas, you might infer there’s something going on in Texas with Latinos.
The other thing is, let’s go back to that unaffiliated. Latinos tend to not be affiliated with a political party more frequently. So part of what we’re seeing with the unaffiliateds is wrapped up with the fact that lots of Latinos are voting as well.
Sargent: Well, back to the New York Times poll. In this House generic ballot matchup, the Democrats are leading the Republicans among Hispanics by 61 to 31 points. That is a 30-point edge among Latinos. I’ve got to think you put that together with the unusual level of early voting energy among Hispanics, and that tells a story as well, doesn’t it?
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s probably going to be a big part of the story once we get all the exit polls in and post-election surveys. People are going to definitely be talking about Latinos and how they participated.
Sargent: OK. So what’s the grand takeaway here, Michael? Things look good, but it would be crazy to get overconfident. Is that the size of it?
McDonald: Yeah, I mean, definitely where the battleground is shifted, it’s on Republican territory. And there are signs of Republican engagement in those states. And even when you drill down into some of the congressional districts that aren’t in those states but are still toss-ups.
So we still have a long ways to go. We have yet to get to Election Day, and it’s going to basically be determined then. Can the Democrats build up enough of a lead in the early vote, which is what they typically do, to withstand what will likely be a very big red day for Republicans on that Tuesday of the election?
Sargent: So what are you looking for at the end of the early voting here? To conclude that Democrats have built up something of a firewall, how will we know that that has happened?
McDonald: Yeah, once we get through it all—I mean, we’re seeing these same-day comparisons now, and you can see that Democrats and unaffiliated are much more engaged than Republicans. Is that going to persist? Is it going to go all the way through to, like, the weekend before Election Day?
And if it does, in the past, that’s been a fairly good predictor of how things turn out on Election Day as well. Because we’re measuring relative enthusiasm to vote when we look at these early vote numbers. And if there’s enthusiasm, you know, the Saturday or Sunday before the election, it’s enthusiasm that tends to carry over to Election Day as well.
Sargent: It seems like there’s another positive civic story here unfolding as well, which is that Trump has been threatening to rig the election and steal the election in all kinds of ways. He tried to pass his voter suppression thing to essentially end vote by mail and make it really, really hard to vote.
And he spent months telling Republicans that they had to do this, otherwise Democrats might actually be able to win the election. He basically spent months saying, we’ve got to close down voting, otherwise we’re screwed. Which is an interesting message, right?
But now, all of a sudden, here we are. Trump’s Save America Act didn’t happen. His effort to hijack the Postal Service to try and steal the election fell apart, and people are voting, right? I mean, that’s where we are. Like, we’re actually seeing the election start to unfold.
People are participating. ICE isn’t showing up at the polls, at least yet, I don’t know. Like, I feel like that might be good. I would certainly not urge people to stop being vigilant, but it’s kind of a positive story that’s emerging here.
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the good news story here is people are voting, and they’re voting, in some cases for a midterm election, at record numbers. So the system seems to be working as normal as we expect it to work.
But I’ll tell you, the way in which people are protecting themselves are probably going to help the Democrats, because we’re seeing mail ballots getting returned sooner, for people who have them.
And because they’re returning them sooner, if there are any problems with those mail ballots, there’ll be a chance for them to—in the election administration world—cure those deficiencies, and have those ballots counted. But we’re also seeing fewer people request and use mail ballots as well. So they’re shifting into in-person early voting.
And it really is like, these deficiencies with mail ballots—people, if you’re going to vote by mail, follow the instructions very carefully. Because every election cycle, hundreds of thousands of people have their mail ballots rejected by election officials because they don’t follow the instructions.
But if they’re voting in person, well any of those problems are going to be resolved at the polling place. So those votes are going to be counted more readily than they are by mail.
Sargent: So again, it looks like Trump may have shot himself in the foot again. I just want to underscore this, because it’s pretty fun. So basically, by threatening vote by mail, by talking about rigging the election, by talking about how our elections are fraudulent, Donald Trump essentially encouraged Democrats and probably a lot of independents as well to, A, vote by mail earlier and be damn sure that you’re getting it right so the vote can’t be taken away from you, and B, more people are voting in person early and not risking Trump stealing their ballot from the mailbox, right? So he really screwed himself in this way too.
McDonald: Yeah, it’s probably a net thousands of Democratic votes that are going to show up because of Trump’s rhetoric.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to follow Michael’s stuff, and you can track what he’s doing on the early vote day in and day out. Go to michaelmcdonald.substack.com, or visit the early vote dashboard at the UF Election Lab. That’s the University of Florida Election Lab. Michael McDonald, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
McDonald: Great to be with you.