FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 8, 2020
Contact: Press@TargetSmart.com
TargetSmart Launches Dashboard for Early Vote & Vote By Mail Data
Users can track partisan affiliation & demographic data of early voters in battleground states
Washington, D.C. – Today, TargetSmart, the nation’s leading Democratic political analytics firm, launched “TargetEarly,” a dashboard of national and state-by-state early vote data that tracks how many people have cast their ballots in-person and by mail as well as their modeled partisan affiliation. The dashboard is available at TargetEarly.Targetsmart.com. It is updated daily and includes a wealth of demographic data including age, gender, race, and education level, as well as whether voters live in urban, suburban, or rural areas, and whether they are frequent or infrequent voters. The tool also allows users to compare the data to 2018 and 2016.
To date, TargetEarly has data on 5 million voters who have already voted early or by mail. By comparison, in 2016, fewer than 600,000 people had voted by this point.
“For years, TargetSmart has collected early vote returns leading up to election day to inform our clients which voters have already voted and help them run cost-effective GOTV campaigns. But we’ve decided to make this information available to the public because there are useful insights to be discovered based on who has already voted and this information might motivate more Americans to participate in the process,” said Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart. “We believe that voting is a fundamental right that should be celebrated, protected, and expanded.”
Read Tom Bonier’s Blog Post with recommendations on how to interpret TargetEarly data.
TargetEarly links early vote data to TargetSmart’s national voter registration database, where TargetSmart can observe and report on the demographic and political composition of individuals that have voted early or by absentee.
For example, nationally, compared to 2016, the African American vote is up 3.5%; the women vote is up 2%; rural voters are down 5.5% and suburban voters are up 5%. The Democratic vote is up 5% and the Republican vote is down 4%, based on TargetSmart’s model for party ID.
In North Carolina, TargetEarly finds that nearly 400,000 voters have voted early, compared to under 30,000 voters at this point in 2016. Of those who have already voted this year, 27% have either never voted before or are infrequent voters. Turnout among Black voters in North Carolina is also very high, comprising 16.6% of the electorate compared to 9.3% at the same point in 2016. Overall, modeled Democrats comprise more than 60% of those who have voted, just 31% of voters are modeled Republicans.
Data can be viewed in chart or tabular format and filtered by up to a combination of two demographic or modeled subgroups.
For questions on TargetEarly, please email press@targetsmart.com.
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TARGETSMART is the leading provider of political data that enables campaigns and organizations to successfully communicate with large audiences through personalized outreach. Their politically-focused approach combines consumer data, analytics, data integration and consulting solutions for microtargeted, multichannel marketing strategies.
