Unreturned (or unprocessed) ballots are a ~ 15% redder than returned ones but there are still more ~270k more Dems in that batch

— umichvoter ???? (@umichvoter) October 16, 2024

Detroit is at 16% of its total 2020 turnout 22 days before the election and there are still more than 60,000 outstanding absentee ballots there

If 80% of absentee ballots get turned in, they'll be over a third of 2020 turnout just in mail voting https://t.co/A1uN5OY5Ce

— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) October 14, 2024

If you know Georgia political geography, you would be freaking out this morning.

Clayton County — which put Joe Biden over the top in Georgia when it posted its absentee ballots at 4 am — is at 10.1% turnout! pic.twitter.com/LZEi6XhgZZ

— Data&Politics | Blue Georgia ???? (@dataandpolitics) October 16, 2024

In America we get to see almost live postal (aka absentee) vote returns in a way that just isn’t permissible in the UK.

Whilst most Americans will vote on November 5th a substantial number of Americans are already voting or have voted and people will analyse those returns to extrapolate the result of the White House race and I am not sure that is wise.

In the past when I was a political betting ingénue I’ve gotten things wrong on American presidential politics because I over analysed returns like this.

The major caveat is that just because you’re a registered Republican or registered Democrat and you’ve returned your ballot there’s no automaticity that you’ve voted for your registered party, particularly if you’ve engaged in split ticketing.

With the way Donald Trump and encouraged his supporters to avoid postal voting in the past I’d expect the returns to heavily favour the Dems, any comparisons with 2020 will also be flawed because of the pandemic which altered how people voted.

To use an analogy PBers might understand, analysing these returns may well be the equivalent of mistaking a Scottish subsample for a full blown Scottish poll.

TSE