Forget the Polls, Early Voting Suggests Trump Is in Trouble

Democrats are nervous. 

Over the past three weeks, Donald Trump has erased Kamala Harris’ roughly two point national polling edge, even taking the slightest of leads himself in the RealClearPolitics average.

According to that same average, Trump is also ahead in all of the top battleground states: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. His advantages fall well within polls’ margins-of-error, however, rendering these races statistical dead-heats.

Still, at this time in 2016 and 2020, Clinton was up by 5.4 points and Biden was up by 7.8 nationally, with commanding leads in key swing state polls. Democrats were anxious, as they always tend to be, but the polls offered comfort. Now, they elicit despair.

But there’s still plenty of hope for rattled Democrats. This year, pollsters significantly altered their methods, a concerted effort to correct for underestimating Trump’s vote share by 4.2 points in 2020 and even more in 2016. As a result, it’s possible that polls are now instead misjudging Harris’ support and overstating Trump’s.

A more resoundingly auspicious sign for Democrats can be seen in early voting numbers. So far, according to state-reported data tracked by the University of Florida’s Election Lab, women are outvoting men by a sizable 10.2 percent gap in the six states that break down voting by gender (CO, GA, ID, MI, NC, VA). This is almost twice the average gender voting gap since 1996. With just over 50 million in-person and mail-in votes cast, women seem to be outvoting men at an enormous rate. 

What’s more, women are turning out in far greater numbers than men in three key swing states. In North Carolina, with 3,101,657 votes cast (as of 10/29) – over half of the 2020 total – women represent 51.9 percent of the electorate to men’s 41.8 percent (with 6.3 percent unknown). In Georgia, with 3,058,097 votes cast – again, well over half of the 2020 total – women represent 55.5 percent of the electorate to men’s 43.8 percent (0.7 percent unknown). In Michigan, with 1,992,670 votes cast, roughly a third of the 2020 total, women represent 55.3 percent of the electorate to men’s 44.2 percent (0.5 percent unknown). 

Why is this such a good sign for Harris and the Democrats? Simple, because dating back to 1980, women have voted for Democrats in vastly greater numbers than men. The difference in party support between the sexes is termed the voting gender gap. And this year, it’s shaping up to be historically large. 

As reported last Friday in USA Today:

In the latest USA TODAY/Suffolk University national poll, women decisively backed Democrat Kamala Harris, 53% to 36%. That’s a mirror image of men’s overwhelming support for Republican Donald Trump, 53% to 37%. If those margins hold until Election Day, it would be the biggest disparity since a gender gap emerged more than four decades ago, in 1980.

Noticing this 16-point gender gap (compared to a 12-point gap in 2020), as well as women’s massive turnout thus far in early voting, University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, who maintains the Election Lab, had this to say:

“I only have gender statistics for six states, but if this is what is happening elsewhere — and the polling is right about the big gender gap — Trump is going to need the world’s largest sausage party on Election Day.”

Liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore notably predicted Trump’s win in 2016 and Biden’s victory in 2020. What’s playing out now in early voting meshes with his confident forecast that Harris will be elected on November 5th.

“Are you not aware that there’s going to be a tsunami of women voting between now and Election Day?” he said in a CNN interview earlier this month, arguing that disdain for the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade would drive them to overwhelmingly rebuke Trump and the GOP. 

“Anybody who thinks women are going to stay home… Do you not know any women?”