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Understanding Pennsylvania's Early Vote | Booman23 |

This year I am going to revert back to how I voted in 2016, in person on Election Day at that elementary school. Even though I'm tempted to vote early to help GOTV efforts, I like voting in person on Election Day and I especially like knowing my vote will be counted right away, and everyone will see it on their television screens on Election Night.

I tell this story because it will help you understand the significance of this article in Politico.

• Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania, a red flag for GOP

The main theme of the article is about the early vote with Pennsylvanians over 65, and I'm not that old yet. But there are two things about the elder vote here that are encouraging to the Democrats. The first and most important is that several polls are showing Harris winning the elder vote, where Clinton and Biden lost it. The second is that pollsters are asking people they contact who have already cast a ballot who they voted for, and they're seeing an advantage for Harris here, too.

This is positive news, but it's not why I'm writing this.

[...]

This is exactly what we expected to see, with the Republicans cannibalizing more of their Election Day vote than the Democrats. Now, put that together with the data on the elder vote, and the Democrats are feeling good. That's because "voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots" and "registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans."

Then there's survey data on the elder vote as a whole. The most recent Fox News poll of Pennsylvania  has Trump "running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over." That's troubling for the Republicans because elders have the highest percentage turnout of any demographic, and 53 percent of them voted for Trump last time in a losing effort.

Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout | ABC News |

This raises two questions for 2024: First, what would happen if the polls are off again? And second, how likely is it that the polls will be off by as much as they were in 2016 or 2020?

Either Trump or Harris could win comfortably

In 2020, polls overestimated Biden's margin over Trump by about 4 percentage points in competitive states. As of Oct. 30 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, the margin between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in 538's polling averages is smaller than 4 points in seven states: the familiar septet of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That means that, if the polling error from 2020 repeats itself, Trump would win all seven swing states and 312 Electoral College votes.