A new Suffolk University/USA Today poll out today has Kamala Harris up a single point on Donald Trump also gives us this tidbit: that Harris has a 29-point lead on Trump among early voters.
Those two numbers don’t seem to jibe, given that here in Virginia, we’re already past the 1 million early-vote mark, representing about a quarter of the total turnout that we saw in the record-shattering 2020 election.
The Virginia Public Access Project early-voting dashboard had the total number of votes already cast in the Commonwealth at 1,023,200 at the start of the voting day on Monday.
Joe Biden won Virginia in 2020 by a 10.1-point margin over Trump, and the FiveThirtyEight.com poll average has Harris up by 7.0 points with two weeks to go until Election Day.
Nationwide, TargetEarly reports that 12.9 million people have already voted, which would come to 8.1 percent of the total number of votes cast in the 2020 election.
The obvious advantages to having votes already locked in: you’re taking advantage of your voters’ enthusiasm, you can focus your get out the vote operations on a smaller number of people, and the other side has to deal with the twin issues of motivating their voters and having to really work the GOTV game hard on that one day.
Another number worth paying attention to from the TargetEarly data: women seem to be particularly enthused about getting out to vote, with 7.0 million of the 12.9 million early voters being women.
Back to the Suffolk University/USA Today poll: Kamala Harris has a 22-point lead on Donald Trump among voters who cite abortion rights as their key issue.