Hundreds of thousands of Californians have already voted, with more than three weeks still to go until Election Day.
Research firm Political Data Inc. reports that 586,000 ballots have already been returned in California. That is 29 times the amount of ballots that had been submitted by this point in the 2016 election.
“We’re definitely seeing a really rapid rate of voters returning those ballots, much more rapidly than ever before in California,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.
While some of that increase is likely is due to the pandemic and the state’s move to send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter automatically, “there really is a lot of voter enthusiasm right now,” said Mitchell.
Typically, early voters tend to lean Republican.
“As they get into the days and weeks afterwards of counting ballots, that’s when they’re getting a lot of the people that voted later or had to do a same day registration or had to vote with provisional ballot and those always broke Democratic. They call that the blue shift,” explained Mitchell.
While those results usually do not impact the result of an election, in very tight races it can be enough to turn the tide.
But that pattern has reversed itself this year, with Democrats voting early and Republicans eager to vote in person on election day.
“This year that just might not happen that we see this big shift, because so many Democrats are voting early,” said Mitchell, who does not expect results to shift significantly after election night this year.
90% of the early voters in California are considered “likely voters” or voters who were already expected to vote this year. So on its own, the high early turnout does not mean that overall turnout will be higher than normal.
But Mitchell says when you add in the higher than normal registration rates and strong enthusiasm, “I would predict that we’d probably see percentage rates of turnout that are close to the 1980 election… and in terms of raw votes cast, we’re going to shatter any election. We’ve got 22 million voters probably, by the time the election rolls around and the total number of voters will break every record.”