California Absentee Analysis 11/1

There are now 3 million absentee ballots in, roughly 22% of the overall vote. Absentees should top 6 million, but many of those will be dropped off at the ballot box on Tuesday. We've had a fascinating week when it comes to party ID distribution of absentee ballots. Below is the spread between Democratic and Republican ballots by day.

October 25: Democratic +8.7%
October 26: Democratic +5.9%
October 29: Democratic +8.2%
October 30: Democratic +5.4%
October 31: Democratic +8.9%
November 1: Democratic +5.4%

This is too uniform to be coincidence. I have to think that some heavily Democratic leaning counties are reporting their VBM ballots every other day. So the spread dropped from Democratic +6.4% to Democratic +6.3%. At the current rate, the absentee ballot spread will end up close to Democratic +7.0%. Democrats would like to get the electorate above Democratic +11.0%. To get there, they'll need to be +15.0% on election day. Republicans would like to keep the spread under 9.0%. So they'll need Democratic +11.0% or better on election day.

I don't have data to back-up whether that could happen. It didn't happen in the primary, as the election day electorate mirrored the VBM.

Because the VBM ballots returned were favorable to the Republicans there wasn't much movement in the districts. Due to a flurry of ballots in the Central Valley, there was good movement for the GOP in CD-21 and AD-32. Democrats got improvement in Ventura County based SD-27.