Charles Stewart III
It’s now twelve days to the general election. The Healthy Elections Project has been running a series of surveys in half a dozen battleground states, asking the intention of registered voters about how they intend to cast their ballots. This brief note focuses on Wisconsin.
First, as to the intentions themselves. Not surprisingly, as the following table demonstrates, as Election Day has approached, voters have become more certain of what they intend to do. Overall, as the uncertain voters have decided what to do, they have tended to gravitate toward voting by mail. This is a small trend, based on small numbers, so I wouldn’t make too much of it. If we take the average across all three waves of the survey and exclude those who don’t know how they will vote, we can expect 44% on Election Day, 12% during in-person absentee (early) voting, and 44% by mail. If we take just the most recent wave, these numbers are 42%, 10%, and 48%, respectively.
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Vote mode intention among likely voters, including don’t knows |
|||||
|
Date |
Election Day |
Early |
|
Don’t know |
N |
|
Sept. 4 – Sept. 11 |
44.7% |
11.1% |
40.3% |
4.0% |
496 |
|
Sept. 16 – Sept. 25 |
42.7% |
12.6% |
41.6% |
3.1% |
496 |
|
Sept. 30 – Oct. 9 |
40.8% |
9.9% |
46.2% |
3.1% |
494 |
|
Total |
42.7% |
11.2% |
42.7% |
3.4% |
1,486 |
|
Vote mode intention among likely voters, excluding don’t knows |
||||
|
Date |
Election Day |
Early |
|
N |
|
Sept. 4 – Sept. 11 |
46.5% |
11.6% |
41.9% |
476 |
|
Sept. 16 – Sept. 25 |
44.1% |
13.1% |
42.9% |
480 |
|
Sept. 30 – Oct. 9 |
42.1% |
10.2% |
47.7% |
479 |
|
Total |
44.2% |
11.6% |
44.2% |
1,435 |
(By the way, the overall 95% confidence interval for all three waves combined is around +/- 2.5 points. For any one wave, it’s around 4.4 points.)
Second, to convert these expectations to raw numbers, we need an estimate of turnout. I’ve done this in two ways. The first is just to assume that turnout is 10% above 2016, which would place it at 3.3 million. The second uses a very simple linear regression to predict the log of turnout in terms of the log of registered voters in the most recent six presidential elections, and then extrapolating based on the coefficients derived from that regression. This gives us an estimated turnout of 2.8 million.
Third, here is what the combination of numbers above imply for the final distribution of votes in Wisconsin, by mode:
|
|
Vote mode, combining three waves of survey |
|
Vote mode, using most recent wave of survey |
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|
Assumed turnout |
Election Day |
Early |
|
|
Election Day |
Early |
|
|
2.8 million |
1.238M |
0.325M |
1.238M |
|
1.179M |
0.286M |
1.336M |
|
3.3 million |
1.459M |
0.383M |
1.459M |
|
1.389M |
0.337M |
1.475M |
Fourth, a final calculation needs to be made, if we want to estimate the number of mail ballots that will be requested, since not all mail ballots are returned. During the summer, it seems that 90% of requested mail ballots were returned. If that holds for the general election in Wisconsin, it should expect between 1.4 and 1.6 million mail ballots to be requested.
As of this morning (October 21), 1,419,484 mail ballots have been requested. In recent weeks, requests have been running at around 10,000 per day, so Wisconsin is on target for around 1.5 million mail ballots.
Also, as of this morning, 947,811 mail ballots have been returned. This means that about 60% of the ballots that will be returned have been returned. It also suggests that between now and Election Day, Wisconsin should be seeing an average of 60,000 mail ballots arrive each day, which is just a bit above what was received this past Monday.
One final thing: Today was the first day Wisconsin started separating out in-person absentee voting from is daily absentee report. In this first day, nearly 80,000 people voted early. That’s much higher than the number of mail ballots that were returned (30,846).
Here is the graph that summarizes this all.
