Republicans’ early voting surge: What we know from ballots so far

Republican voters have so far cast more early ballots than Democrats in three of the key swing states, giving the party a potential ray of optimism with less than two weeks before Election Day.

More registered Republicans have voted in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina than Democrats, according to publicly available state data. The party affiliation doesn’t mean that voters have to vote for their party’s candidate, so there’s no way to definitively know whether the early voters supported the person that their party is aligned with.

Polls show an extraordinarily tight contest between Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee, and ex-President Donald Trump, who is at the top of the Republican ticket. While the early voting data is limited in terms of predicting the outcome, it’s helpful for the parties as they intensify get-out-the-vote efforts in the lead-up to the Nov. 5 election.

Trump, who falsely claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent, also has often criticised early and mail-in voting. Yet, the Republican Party for the last four years has heightened efforts to dispel any concerns about the practice in order to close the gap with Democratic voters.

“Voting early, I guess, would be good. But people have different feelings about it,” Trump said during a Fox News interview on Wednesday, adding he was “mixed” about early voting. “But the main thing is, you got to get out, you got to vote. And I will be voting early.”

About 30 million people have cast ballots nationwide as of Thursday, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab’s analysis of states’ early election data. Records were smashed in Georgia and North Carolina, the states’ data show. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada round out the swing states widely expected to determine the election.

It’s not yet clear if the Republican surge in early voting will translate to more votes for Trump and other Republican candidates, said Charles Stewart III, an elections expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It may simply mean that people who used to vote on Election Day are showing up earlier than usual, he said.

Stewart said that the ‘main effect” of early ‘voting is to provide convenience to people who would have voted otherwise.’ Getting those voters out of the way, if they are indeed voting for Trump, means that his campaign can focus on getting less enthusiastic voters to the polls, Stewart said.

Here’s a rundown of how voting looks so far in the swing states that report the party affiliation of early voters:

Arizona

Republicans have embraced early voting despite years of casting doubt on the integrity of Arizona’s election in 2020. In rural Cochise County, Judy Smith Kennedy, the GOP head, said she reassures concerned voters that security cameras are monitoring the county’s ballot drop boxes.

“We’re doing everything we can to make sure we do end up with a fair and just election,” she said.

The data shows a decline in early Democratic voters from 2020, a concerning trend for Sam Almy, who monitors Arizona’s ballots for Uplift, a Democratic campaign firm. Democrats led Republicans in early voting by about 120,000 ballots in late October 2020.

“I’m the first one to panic,” said Almy. The hope for Democrats, he added, is that “2020 could be an anomaly, and we’re just reverting to our previous voting patterns.”

Nevada

Nevada Republicans are touting their success in driving early voters in the state that Trump lost in 2016 and 2020. Republican voters make up 40% of early ballots, according to a ballot tally released by the Secretary of State’s office on Wednesday.

“We’re seeing a strong turnout from Republicans who understand the importance of banking their vote ahead of time,” said Michael McDonald, chair of the state GOP.

Democrats are mobilising, though. Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of Nevada’s powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226, said, “We say every day: Today is Election Day. It is, because once the ballots hit, every single day is Election Day.”

He spoke Tuesday in an interview after rallying a crew of more than 100 union members preparing to canvas door to door in the neighbourhoods around Las Vegas on behalf of Harris and other Democrats.

North Carolina

Data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections show a slight edge for registered Republicans among the 2 million ballots cast early as of midday Thursday, but the state’s huge share of unaffiliated voters makes it hard to draw conclusions.

The turnout among baby boomers, a generation of Americans that normally skews Republican, suggests that the GOP has a good ground game, said Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College, who analysed the data as of Tuesday. Voters 60 to 79 are accounting for 46% of early ballots, Bitzer said, but they make up less than a third of the state’s electorate. Meanwhile, young voters are underperforming.

“Democrats need to start thinking about, ‘What do they need to do to get it more balanced?’” he said.

White people, women and suburban residents, he said, are also casting early ballots in outsize numbers.

Pennsylvania

The one swing state where Democrats hold a large lead in early voting is Pennsylvania, where Democrats have cast 60% of the 1.2 million ballots.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Harris has an advantage, said Michael McDonald, an early voting expert at the University of Florida. That’s because the Keystone State doesn’t have expansive early in-person voting, and generally, Trump supporters aren’t voting by mail, he said. That suggests Republicans could come out in force on Nov. 5.

As of Thursday morning, there were 1.9 million applications for a mail-in or absentee ballots, compared with the total of 2.7 million cast in the 2020 general election, state data shows.

Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin

Michigan and Wisconsin don’t provide party affiliation for early voting. Such data for Georgia wasn’t immediately available, although its early vote tally is surpassing records in previous election cycles, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

Michigan voters are also breaking early voting records with more than 1.3 million ballots cast, about 16% of the electorate.

In Detroit, a Democratic bastion, a record 2,504 people cast ballots during the first weekend of in-person voting that began on Oct. 19, according to the state. Not all parts of Michigan have begun voting yet since the state doesn’t require early voting to be available until Oct. 26.

Turnout for the Badger State’s version of early in-person voting - called in-person absentee voting - was so heavy this week that it slowed down the system election clerks use to print labels for the absentee ballot envelopes.

As of Thursday, voters cast 592,902 absentee ballots. Almost 2 million absentee ballots were cast in the 2020 general election, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.