What early voting data shows about new voters – a group that could influence the election

With nearly 60 million ballots already cast, anyone interested in the presidential election is trying to figure out where the election stands.

Even though so many votes were cast, it's hard to know what that means. Many more people still have to vote, and exactly how many there will be or how they will be divided is unknown. But there is one metric in the early voting data that could be more meaningful to the final result: the number of new voters who have already voted.

An NBC News Decision Desk analysis of state voter data shows that as of Oct. 30, there are signs of an influx of new Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and new Republican voters in Arizona, two of the key swing states.

Early voting by new voters – voters who did not show up in 2020 – is of particular interest because they are votes that could change events in 2024 compared to the last presidential election. (Who voted in 2020 and doesn't show up this time is also important, but it's impossible to know before Election Day.)

Already, the number of new voters in many of the seven closest battleground states exceeds the 2020 margin between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. In Pennsylvania, for example, Biden beat Trump by 80,555 votes in 2020. More than 100,000 new voters have already cast their ballots in Pennsylvania this year, with more to come.

We can't know how these new voters voted, but looking at who they are can provide clues about how 2024 might play out compared to 2020. Party registration doesn't perfectly predict a voter's choice, but new voters who choose to register as Democrats are more likely to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than not, and new voters Those who register as Republicans are more likely to vote for Trump. As a result, in the swing states where voters can officially register for a party (Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania), new voters affiliated with a party may provide some clues about the 2024 election.

(In Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where voters do not officially register with a party, we can best predict the partisanship of new voters based on local voting patterns and demographic data – data that can be quite confusing and sometimes incorrect.)

The gender of new voters in battleground states is also a public data source that sheds light on the relationship between gender and party registration among new voters as elections hinge on a range of gender-related policy issues such as abortion. (Some states also offer the “non-binary” or “other” option on their voter registration forms, although few voters have used this option so far.)

Democrats dominate the number of new voters in Pennsylvania

What are the new voters telling us so far? Let's start in Pennsylvania – not only because it's the closest state according to the polls, but also because the number of new voters who cast ballots there has already exceeded the 2020 range. If everyone from 2020 voted for the same candidate again, these new voters would decide the race.

Pennsylvania data shows wide disparities in the number of votes cast by new voters, both by party registration and gender. More new voters are registered Democrats than Republicans, and new female voters are widening this partisan gap. New male voters are only slightly more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, but among new female voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost two to one.

However, the number of new voters who choose not to officially register with either party complicates the picture, as the number of new unaffiliated voters is almost as large as the gap between the number of new Democrats and the new Republicans. That means independent voting could either erase or expand the advantage that registered Democrats currently have among new early voters.

The opposite trend in Arizona: Male Republicans are leading

Turning to Arizona, the opposite pattern emerges. While there are fewer new voters than in Pennsylvania — in part because early voting began later in Arizona — Arizona's margin in 2020 was also much smaller: just 10,457 votes.

Already, the number of new voters (86,231 on Tuesday) is more than eight times the Biden-Trump margin in 2020 in Arizona. And the largest share of this group of new voters in Arizona so far are male Republicans.

Unlike Pennsylvania, the state's new female voters are also slightly more likely to be registered Republicans than Democrats. But the Republican lead among new voters in Arizona has so far been largely driven by male voters.

Still, the number of new voters who have decided not to join a party is once again significant, and the way they vote could easily alter Republicans' apparent registration advantage among new voters who vote early.

A mixed picture emerges in the other swing states

A look at the remaining five swing states reveals a variety of patterns – and no clear conclusion.

In Michigan, there appears to be a large difference in the behavior of new male and female voters, although conclusions in Michigan are complicated by the fact that there is no party registration there and without this data it is difficult to predict the partisanship of Michigan voters I've seen big mistakes in the past. However, based on these estimates, modeling suggests that Democratic women slightly outperform Republican women among new voters. The same estimates suggest that the number of new Republican men nearly doubles the number of new Democratic men.

Wisconsin, like Michigan, appears to indicate a strong relationship between gender and partisanship among new voters – with new female voters leaning Democratic and new male voters leaning slightly Republican. However, the number of new voters who are likely to be unaffiliated requires extreme caution when attempting to read too much into these estimates.

In the other states with actual party registration data – North Carolina and Nevada – there is a new pattern: Voters who are not affiliated with a party are the largest group of new voters so far, among both men and women. How these independents vote is obviously crucial and also unknown – again highlighting the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions based on early voting data.

One thing is clear, however: These voters could be decisive, as the number of votes cast by new voters in 2024 already exceeds the margin in many of the closest states in 2020. You are entering a polarized electorate and an election that many expect to close. And except in a few states where available data suggests a fuller story, the number of new voters who have no party affiliation — or the lack of party registration in key states — makes it difficult to know exactly how early voting is shaping up will impact this year's election results.

In such cases, it seems a futile exercise to peer into the bowels of the accumulated reports of early voting in the hope of turning them into a prediction of what is to come. Our pro recommendation: take a walk instead and enjoy the fall weather.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com