For Immediate Release

October 5, 2021

Contact: Press@targetsmart.com

Washington, D.C. – Today, TargetSmart, the nation’s leading Democratic political data and analytics firm, launched an updated version of its TargetEarly dashboard to track early and absentee voting for the 2021 New Jersey and Virginia general elections. This dashboard will update early vote data daily and includes a wealth of demographic data including age, gender, race, and education level, as well as urbanicity, frequency of voting and more. Data can be isolated for a host of geographies, including county, media market, state legislative district and more. 

“We know that the best indication of someone’s past voting habits is their past vote history. The TargetEarly tool gives campaign practitioners and other interested parties access to best-in-class data to analyze and contextualize the early vote data coming out of Virginia and New Jersey,” said TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier.  “With more Americans voting earlier than ever before, it’s not enough to say that early turnout is surging, we need to understand who is voting and how that compares to previous cycles. TargetEarly does just that.” 

Key Virginia Takeaways:

Many states, including Virginia, are seeing significant changes in voter habits as a result of the adoption of more inclusive early voting laws in 2020.  This context is vital when comparing 2021 returns with previous cycles. 

• In Virginia, more than 180,000 votes have already been cast, compared to just 16,000 at this point in 2017.
• The earliest of early voters in Virginia tend to be much older than the Virginia electorate overall. In fact, only 17% of those who have cast a ballot so far are under the age of 50. 
• 22.4% of the 2021 electorate did not vote in 2017. Of those voters who did not vote in 2017, 48% are modeled as Democrats, compared to just 26.2% Republican. 
• The share of current African-American early voters in Virginia (11.7%) exceeds 2017 levels (8.2%) by 3.5 points.

Key New Jersey Takeaways:

• Registered Democrats are outpacing Republicans by nearly 40% (63.9% vs. 24.5%).
• 31.7% of the current New Jersey electorate did not cast a ballot in 2017. 

TargetEarly is the only one-stop database of national and state-by-state early vote data that links early vote data to a comprehensive voter database to provide detailed reports on voter trends.

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.