With early voting results, Trump leads in Michigan – but don’t read too much into it yet

With around 30% of expected Michigan votes accounted for at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, incumbent President Donald Trump was up 55.5% to Democrat Joe Biden’s 42.58%, according to The Associated Press.

That is the expected early result, according to numbers-watchers, because Republicans are more amenable to voting in-person while many Democrats elected to vote absentee due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“What’s going to happen on election night is that the results are going to be coming in, and it’s going to look like a huge, huge victory for Donald Trump. But then as the night progresses and some absentee votes come in it’s going to shift to Biden,” pollster Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research & Communications told MLive last week.

Absentee votes, by nature, take longer to count. For the first time this cycle some of Michigan’s larger counties were allowed to begin pre-processing them — or preparing them for tabulation — prior to Election Day. But the actual counting of those absentee ballots could not take place until the polls opened, and like in-person voters, absentee ballots could come in until polls closed at 8 p.m.

See full results here.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a press conference just after 10 p.m. that an estimated 3.5 million absentee ballots were cast, while between 2 and 2.5 million people voted in person.

She expects a “very clear picture, if not a final picture” of the unofficial Michigan results in the next 24 hours,” she said.

Absentee votes were coming in at a higher-than-normal clip as the election approached. This is the first presidential race Michigan voters have had no-reason absentee voting.

Below is a chart showing how many absentee ballots were cast in areas across the state as of Tuesday morning. Search for your local area by typing in the field with the magnifying glass icon.

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Also, below is a map showing how absentee ballots are coming in across the state as compared to how many were cast in each area in 2016.

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A few geographic areas worth noting at this juncture:

– Kent County: Republican votes make up a majority of what’s been counted so far in Kent County. The president had 88,057 votes to his name as of 9:50 p.m., while 63,814 votes were counted for Biden. Nearly 57% of the Kent County votes counted before 10 p.m. were cast for Trump, while 41% were cast for Biden. The county has reported 21% of its expected vote. Trump won Kent County by 3 percentage points in 2016, a margin of 9,497 votes. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won the county two years later.

– Wayne County: The state’s largest county reported 30% of the expected votes just before 10 p.m. Biden held nearly 56% of the votes counted at the time, while Trump held 43%. Wayne County reliably votes for Democrats, and Trump lost the county by 39 percentage points in 2016. Detroit has tabulated 120,000 of the 175,000 absentee ballots today, according to an update from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson around 10 p.m.

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