Early voting data shows there are new voters, a group that could influence the 2024 election

With almost 60 million votes already cast, everyone is interested in the presidential elections trying to figure out where the race stands.

Despite so many votes being cast, it’s hard to know what it means. Many more people still need to vote, and exactly how many there will be or how they will be distributed is unknown. But there is one metric in the early voting data that could be more suggestive of the final results: the number of new voters who have already voted.

An NBC News Decision Desk analysis of voter data in the state shows that as of Oct. 30, there are signs of an influx of new female Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and new male Republican voters in Arizona, two of the key swing states.

The early votes of new voters — voters who didn’t show up in 2020 — are of particular importance because they are votes that could change what happens in 2024 compared to the last presidential election. (Who voted in 2020 and doesn’t show up this time is also important, but it’s impossible to know before Election Day.)

The number of new voters in many of the seven closest battleground states already exceeds the 2020 margin between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. In Pennsylvania, for example, Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by 80,555 votes. More than 100,000 new voters have already cast ballots in Pennsylvania this year, with more to follow.

We can’t know how these new voters voted, but looking at who they are can give us hints about how 2024 might swing versus 2020. Party registration doesn’t perfectly predict a voter’s choice, but new voters who favor it choosing to register as Democrats are. They are more likely to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than not, and new voters who register as Republicans are more likely to vote for Trump. As a result, in the swing states where voters can formally register for a party (Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), new party-affiliated voters may provide some hints about the 2024 election.

(In Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where voters don’t officially register with a party, the best we can do to predict the partisanship of new voters depends on local voting patterns and demographic data — data that can be quite noisy and sometimes wrong .)

The gender of new voters in battleground states is also a public data point, shedding light on the relationship between gender and party registration among new voters, amid elections that hinge on a number of political issues related to gender, such as abortion. (Some states also offer a “non-binary” or “other” option on their voter registration forms, and so far a small number of voters have taken advantage of that.)

Female Democrats dominate Pennsylvania’s new voter turnout

What do the new voters tell us so far? Let’s start in Pennsylvania – not just because people think so the closest state according to the pollsbut also because the number of new voters who cast their votes there has already exceeded the 2020 margin. If everyone were to vote for the same candidate again starting in 2020, these new voters would decide the race.

The Pennsylvania data show wide disparities in the number of votes cast by new voters, both by party registration and by gender. There are more new registered Democrats than Republicans, and new female voters are the driving force behind this partisan divide. New male voters are only slightly more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, but among new female voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 2 to 1.

However, the number of new voters who decide not to officially register with either party complicates the picture, as the number of new, unaffiliated voters is almost the same as the difference between the number of new Democrats and new Republicans. That means the unaffiliated vote could erase or increase the advantage registered Democrats currently have among new early voters.

The opposite trend in Arizona: male Republicans leading the way

Looking at Arizona, the opposite pattern emerges. Although there are fewer new voters than in Pennsylvania — in part because early voting started later in Arizona — Arizona’s margin in 2020 was also much smaller: just 10,457 votes.

The number of new voters (86,231 as of Tuesday) is already more than eight times the 2020 Biden-Trump margin in Arizona. And the bulk of that group of new Arizona voters so far are male Republicans.

New female voters are also slightly more likely to be registered Republicans than Democrats in the state, unlike in Pennsylvania. But the Republican advantage among new voters in Arizona has so far been largely driven by male voters.

Still, the number of new voters choosing not to affiliate with either party is significant, and the way they choose to vote could easily change the apparent Republican registration advantage among new voters who vote early.

A mixed picture in the other swing states

Looking at the remaining five swing states reveals a variety of patterns – and no clear takeaways.

In Michigan, there is a hugely clear difference in the behavior of new male and female voters, although the conclusions in Michigan are complicated by the fact that there is no party registration there and the difficulty of predicting the partisanship of Michigan voters without that data, I have seen some big mistakes in the past. But based on these estimates, models show that Democratic women are slightly outpacing Republican women among new voters. The same estimates suggest that new Republican men will nearly double the number of new Democratic men.

Wisconsin, like Michigan, also appears to indicate a strong link between gender and partisanship among new voters — with new female voters breaking for Democrats and new male voters breaking slightly for Republicans. However, the number of new voters predicted to be unaffiliated calls for enormous caution in trying to read too much into these estimates.

In the other states with actual party registration data – North Carolina and Nevada – there is a new pattern: Voters unaffiliated with either party make up the largest group of new voters so far, among both men and women. How these independents vote is of course crucial and also unknown – again highlighting the difficulty of reaching strong conclusions based on early voting data.

That said, one thing is clear: these voters could be decisive, as the number of votes cast by the new voters in 2024 is already greater than the margin in many of the closest states in 2020. They find themselves in a polarized electorate and elections that many expect will take place. near. And except in a few states where the available data is beginning to suggest a broader story, the number of new unaffiliated voters — or the lack of party registration in key states — makes it difficult to know exactly how early voting will translate into this year’s election results.

In such cases, staring into the bowels of collected early voting reports in the hope of extracting a prediction of what’s to come seems like an exercise in futility. Our professional recommendation: go for a walk and enjoy the fall weather instead.