Nine days of Ohio early voting. Here is the trend line.
Day 1, Democrats stormed the early vote: D+18 statewide among in-person voters. Day 9: D+3. Days 7 and 8 were D+1.5 and D+1.2. Even.
That is a 15-point slide in nine voting days.
And not one place. All 88 Ohio counties moved toward Republicans from week 1 to week 2.
ALL 88. Not one exception.
The median county moved 11 points. The eight big blue counties moved 14.5 from day 1 to day 9, from D+49 to D+34. Summit alone moved 25. The seven red counties went from D+4 on opening day to R+7 on Friday.
Volume didn't move. Week 2 ran at 99% of week 1 statewide, 103% in the blue counties. The people kept coming. The Democrats didn't. Democratic-registered in-person ballots fell 18% per day from week 1 to week 2 statewide, 11% in the blue counties. Republican-registered ballots rose 7%. Unaffiliated voters went from 25% of the daily early vote to 37%.
Translation: the Dem base front-loaded. It showed up in the first 48 hours, got counted, and the "surge" headlines got written. Everything since looks like the normal Ohio electorate, and the normal Ohio electorate is R+8 or worse.
Democrats still lead the cumulative in-person vote, D+8.4, about 30,000 ballots out of 359,754. That lead grew by 22,000 in week 1 and 8,000 in week 2. It is being diluted a little more every day, and the biggest days are still ahead.
In 2022 the final week of early voting ran 40,000 to 47,000 in-person votes a day, more than any day so far this year.
If you think the voters who show up last are more Democratic than the ones who showed up first, I have a trend line to show you.