Hmmm: Final Indicators From Early Voting Look...Pretty Good for Republicans, Actually

First off, if you haven't already voted, pause your perusal of this post, and go cast your ballot.  It's the most important thing you'll do all day.  Meanwhile, some of the early voting indicators we shared last week looked reasonably healthy for the Republican Party -- with all the requisite asterisks and disclaimers, which we'll revisit in a moment, firmly in place.  As of yesterday, how were the updated tallies looking?  NBC supplied some interesting data from eight key states.  

As we think about this information, it's also pretty clear that early voting has exploded across the board, compared to the last midterm cycle (a GOP blowout).  More than 38 million early and absentee ballots have been counted in 2018, easily eclipsing 2014's 22 million.  Turnout is sky high. 

On Benson & Harf last night, Karl Rove mentioned a few positive signs for the GOP, based on early and absentee voting.  For instance, he said that in Arizona, where President Trump won by over three points in 2016, Republican voters outpaced Democratic voters in early voting by 7.2 percent.  This year, the GOP's advantage had swelled to 7.9 percent.  In Florida, Democrats built a 94,000-vote lead with earlies and absentees in the presidential year (Trump narrowly carried the state); this year, it's down to 24,000.  "I like looking at [that data] because the bigger they are, like Florida or Texas, [they] tend to sort of presage what's going to happen on election day," he said.  But he also issued this word of caution: "Here's why you shouldn't put total confidence in the election numbers because we don't know how many defections there are and there are places where there are going to be defections from the party of the chose of the primary voter. Second of all, because we have a large number of people, like in Florida, who decline to state their party or in Texas whom have never voted in a primary."