The past couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at Utah’s early voting data — the information sent to political campaigns and news media showing who already sent in their ballots and had them processed by their county clerks.
Last week, we concluded that there just wasn’t much early voting data out there when compared to earlier elections. Either county clerks were slow in their count, or voters weren’t getting their ballots in quickly, or a combination of the two. (That latter option was most likely.)
Well, we have more data now, enough that I feel more comfortable in the existence of tea leaves to be read.
Five days before the election closes, 19.7% of Utahns who had received a ballot had been marked as voted by their county clerk.
Once again, the data differs wildly by county. Some — Iron, Carbon and Salt Lake, I’m looking at you — are clearly behind in their processing compared to other counties.
Because of those differences in reporting, you can’t really look at the state averages and get an idea about the electorate. As you know, there are more Democrats and unaffiliated voters in Salt Lake County than in other Utah counties, so knowing that Salt Lake County is counting ballots more slowly than other highly populated places skews the data.
But what you can do is look at the county-by-county differences in who has voted so far, because, there, you’re comparing apples to apples. And what we’re seeing is that, in the biggest counties, more Republicans have mailed their ballots to their county clerks than Democrats have.
Zooming in more specifically:
• While 12.7% of Salt Lake County residents who were mailed a ballot have had their votes processed so far, 16.3% of registered Republicans have their vote in the file, compared with 13.6% of registered Democrats. (Only 8.6% of registered unaffiliated voters have had their ballots processed.)
• We’re seeing even bigger gaps in counties where more ballots have been counted. In Davis County, 32.4% of registered Republicans have had their ballots processed, compared with 27.2% of Democrats and 20.1% of unaffiliated vorters. In Utah County, the numbers show 26.6% of registered Republicans, 20.5% of Democrats, and 14.7% of unaffiliated voters have had their ballots processed.
It’s hardly a surprise that Republican turnout would top that of Democrats and unaffiliated voters. Republicans have more of the older electorate who have typically been more reliable voters, especially in midterm elections. But I didn’t necessarily expect to see that in the early voting: Republicans, at least nationally, repeatedly have decried vote-by-mail systems, and some GOP groups have gone so far as to suggest voters wait until Election Day on Tuesday to cast their ballots. In Utah, though, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats have turned in their ballots early.
The Utah trend bucks a national one. According to data compiled by the consulting firm TargetSmart, early voting nationally has shown an increase from registered Democrats when compared to previous elections.
The slow reporting of Salt Lake County and the short history of by-mail voting in Utah limits our ability, however, to compare early voting data in Utah to previous elections.
The news gets worse for independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin when further considering the results of recent polling. In an Emerson College poll taken last week, 69% of voters who intended to cast their ballots for Republican Sen. Mike Lee had yet to do so, compared to 61% of voters who intended to cast their ballots for McMullin. (Lee led that poll by 10 percentage points, as our columnist Robert Gehrke discussed.) That poll had an 800-voter sample size, but Emerson is a well-regarded pollster that usually does a good job of making its polling samples representative of the state as a whole.
Certainly, there’s still plenty of room for surprises. Most of the Utahns who will vote in the election have not yet had their ballots counted. Many of those registered Republicans who have had their ballots processed may have voted for McMullin.
But the truth of the math McMullin needs means he’ll need as much vote as he can get from independents and Democrats — and right now, those voters haven’t turned out at the same rates as those registered with the GOP.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com.
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