Welcome to The Lost Debata Show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And today I talk to Tom Bonnier, who is a data guru and strategist, who I've been quoting from over the past few weeks. He, among other things, runs Target Smart, which is probably the largest data analytics company for Democratic campaigns out there. And we try to go through, even though we're both

Democrats, as objective an analysis of the early vote and some of the polls and trends as possible.

So I think you're going to love that. And normally I put these interviews on the back end of the

episodes, but I actually think we're going to start with this one because it's actually like probably the most important question we have out there before we get to any of the other stuff that I'll talk about later is who's voted and what does that mean?

Like the actual votes matter more than what anybody else says about this election.

And so we're going to get to that.

After that interview, I will talk through, you know, the sort of emptying of the notebook that I tend to do on Mondays. We'll talk about Trump on Rogan. We'll talk about whether Harris is going to go on Rogan. We'll talk about the Madison Square Garden rally. We'll talk about polling. We'll talk about Vance's appearances. They fall out from the John Kelly remarks, all that kind of stuff.

So I'll talk about that after this interview with Tom. Without further ado, let's jump into

the interview. Well, Tom, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here. Well, I've been quoting

from your data and your tweets. I have you as a trifecter with Michael Pruser and Mike McDonald

that I've been talking about for two weeks now. So it's great to have you on. And I know you like me

are a Democrat, but our audience is mixed. So we're going to try to just be as objective for them as

possible. Let's just start with the top line trends that you're seeing across the country to the extent there are any about the early vote right now.

Yeah. And it's early, it's easy to be unbiased when it comes to this data because we're just talking about the data. So top line trends, I think it's helpful to set the context from prior elections, if I can for a second, because

2020 was the biggest expansion of early voting that we've ever seen in this country.

We're generally, you know, you would see somewhere around 40 or 45 percent of votes cast before

election day.

And then for obvious reasons, the pandemic, in 2020, we saw two-thirds of

ballots cast before election day. Over 100 million Americans cast an early vote. So that's important

context. And the context within that context is, we have to remember, Donald Trump told his supporters

that vote by mail was fraudulent.

So he actually likely depressed early voting turnout to some sense. It's hard to believe,

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