Reading Tea Leaves

“Do ya hear me darling? I always look at the tea. You can see things, don’t laugh at me,” my grandmother.

It was the last of old-world things any grandparent I had held onto without a touch of forced ceremony. My grandmother would read the tea leaves. It had no basis in reality and often just reinforced her suspicions and feelings on someone or something. The pundit world is engaged in a sector wide tea leaves reading experiment. Early voting and ballot requests mean something.

Both sides are looking at the data, which varies by state, and are drawing conclusions. There are firewalls! What does that even mean in states that Biden won by 10,000 or even 80,000 votes that included vote counting stoppages *and* tortured allowances for no signature matches or even dates on postmarked envelopes? Nothing! It is an arbitrary marker to motivate voters on their side. Each side has to model voter churn and the possibility that registration signifies bankable voter. The upper middle drift from the GOP with the emergence of Trump should already be accounted for and with eight years of signaling should show in voter registration, but does the Elon type of swap where the Democrats left a voter behind show up in registration numbers? We do not know.

Reviewing racial breakdown of early voting has some Democrats nervous in the South. Is this a problem though, if the higher white vote percentage are TDS motivated whites or urban whites excited to vote thinking they are preventing The Handmaid’s Tale? Not at all. It depends on where and who, and no one has an answer for that.

Some states show changes in behavior like Virginia and Nevada. Virginia is causing even Democrat partisans to revise a Harris margin of victory down from 10% to even 5%, some say 2-3%. Nevada’s early numbers suggest the flirtation with Trump in ‘20 and party split in governor and Senate races in ‘22 will duplicate and might tip his way. Do these effects mean just those states or a broader shift rightward in the voting population? Again, we do not know.

There is another batch of tea leaves at the bottom of the mug and that is the odd media focus on the black male vote. One cable news segment even went so far as to discuss the house vs. field black vote split. Maybe they just sit this one out. This does not equate to massive Reagan ‘84 landslides but it does affect what the machines can reasonably sell to America in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and Milwaukee. This matters when the margins are so small.

The other major problem with the analysis is this is not in the middle of a pandemic. There are Democrats still wearing masks but the fear that drove VBM and EV is gone. No one knows what the share of the election day vote is until it happens. This makes comparisons to ‘20 and even ‘22 a bit strained.

What one can do is note that one side appears more motivated and enthusiastic about voting. In the age of the disappearing elastic voter, all elections come down to base turnouts. The GOP appears to have the edge there. Independents appear to lean Trump, and few recall that in ‘22 this was not the case for GOP Senate candidates. The Democrats appear demoralized. As said elsewhere, the joy is gone. After nine years of Trump is Hitler and the emotional rollercoaster of 2020, do they have it in them? We will know soon. For the time being, we can spend our time doing more productive and satisfying things than read tea leaves.

-By Fred Watson Jr