10-point gender gap in early voting is good sign for Democrats going into final week of election: report

With Election Day less than a week away and early voting well underway, Democrats are viewing the 10-point gap between genders in casting their ballots early as a good sign.

According to a Politico analysis of early voting data in key states, 55 percent of those who have cast their ballot already in the election are women, while 45 percent are men. This trend is also seen among registered Republicans, with more women voting early than men.

"But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters," Politico reported.

Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart, told the outlet, "In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me. I never would have bet on that."

The at least 10-point gender gap in early voting was noted in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, based on data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project, while similar data was not available for other battleground states.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who has had difficulty getting male voters to back her, has focused on female voters, specifically white, non-college-educated suburban women in the final days of her campaign, holding an abortion-focused rally in Texas that featured Beyonce sans a performance from the pop star.

Early voting data has shown that black and Latino women under the age of 30 are showing up at higher rates than their male counterparts, but also in a larger margin than they did in 2020.

Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners and a Democratic pollster who had worked with the Biden campaign, said, "They really want a woman candidate. They really like Harris. They really like having a woman of color run. They’re really strong on the abortion issue. They’ve long followed her on the abortion issue, and they also like her approach to leadership and economics, and they don’t have the internalized sexism that older women voters do."

"These are women who don’t normally show up. That [they’re showing up] that early in October is a good sign," Said Supermajority’s senior director of communications, creative, and digital Jess Herrera, who added, "This group of women is winnable, but they are not won yet."

In North Carolina, Republican women have voted more than any other group so far, amid a nationwide push from Republicans to get out and vote early. Significant numbers of Republican women have voted early.

Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida, said, "We are seeing an increase in Republicans of all types, gender — men and women — voting. It’s just that women are still ahead and keeping pace."