By Kevin Reuning (@KevinReuning)

Yesterday we looked at who is voting early. Today we can take it a step further and look at how those voters are voting. For those not wanting to read, the takeaway is: Independents are breaking towards Democrats in the New York Times Upshot polls, and they are breaking heavily.

We’re exploring the Upshot polling because it’s important to understand that party registration (which is what people are analyzing when they are looking at early voting) does not perfectly align with who an individual actually votes for. In addition, a growing share of the population does not affiliate with a party, meaning there are few clues as to how they will vote. In toss-up races, these voters will make the difference.

To look at how people were voting I estimated a model just among those who had reported that they were voting using a range of demographic categories as well as the “Party File” voter file information in the Upshot data, which represents which party an individual is registered with in states that provide it and a modeled partisan score in states that do not (Upshot does not provide a codebook, but we gleaned this from their public writing on the polls). This is important as right now, voter registration is readily being used to try to identify who is voting early and how they are voting, but we don’t have a good idea of what those who are not Democrats or Republicans are doing.

Well, hopefully we now have a better idea: