The dramatic increase in early voting has led many to believe that elections will effectively be held days or weeks before Election Day. The data so far shows that is not true, and the numbers are not reassuring for Democrats.
Early voting is nowhere near what some people estimate. According to Republican political strategist John Couvillon, who provides daily updates on early voting and mail-in voting, 4.2 million Americans have already cast their votes.
That sounds like a lot, but it’s tiny compared to the 158.6 million votes ultimately cast in 2020.
More importantly, it’s significantly lower than it was at this point in 2020. Early voting is down 45%, Couvillon’s numbers show.
The number of early votes is expected to increase significantly over the next two weeks as some states send out mail-in ballots and others open in-person early voting centers. But even after this happens, early voting rates will likely still be significantly lower.
Virginia, for example, has been offering in-person early voting since late September. People are starting to vote, with 459,000 people voting in person as of October 10th.
However, compared to the same point in 2020, it has decreased by about 4%.
The bigger news is that requests for mail-in ballots have dropped significantly. States that did not send mail-in ballots to all voters saw a 58% decrease from 2020.
The decline was particularly steep in battleground states Georgia and North Carolina, with declines of 84% and 75%, respectively.
While some of that is certainly due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helen, both states’ largest population centers were largely unaffected.
Voters here just don’t want to vote by mail when in-person early voting is widely available.
The decline was smaller in the three blue-wall states in the Midwest, but still significant. Requests for mail-in ballots fell by 59% in Wisconsin, 36% in Pennsylvania and 24% in Michigan.
This is worrying news for Democrats, as Democratic voters have dominated mail-in voting in recent years.
Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania because he built a 1.4 million vote advantage among absentee voters, enough to survive Donald Trump’s 1.33 million vote lead among voters on Election Day.
The fact that Pennsylvania is likely to vote by 1 million fewer people by mail this year means Democrats will have to mount a better ground game if they are to maintain their 2020 performance. .
There are also ominous signs from Virginia that Republicans have learned how to vote early. Although early voting was down overall compared to 2020, more votes were cast in heavily Republican precincts than in safe Democratic seats.
The picture becomes even more stark when you compare Northern Virginia, which is heavily Democratic and has a college education, to Virginia’s rural, white, Republican and non-college-educated areas.
The Washington, D.C., suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria each gave Biden more than 80% of the vote, but each had less than half the number of early votes cast at the same time four years ago.
That’s not the case in Trump’s most favorable counties. He led 10 rural counties in the westernmost part of the state, with a share of more than 80% in 2020. These counties were also more than 90% white, with less than 24% having a four-year college degree.
This is a huge issue, with Trump winning 85% to 96% of the vote against Nikki Haley in this year’s Republican primary. They are exactly the kind of people who are said to be open to election fraud conspiracies and highly skeptical of early voting.
But early voting here has increased since 2020.
It’s impossible to know what these statistics mean. It’s also impossible to turn these into good news for Harris.
It is possible to say what this means for both candidates. There is still plenty of time to influence the race through campaign stops, messages and tactics.
More than 96% of eligible voters have not yet cast their votes. That percentage is unlikely to fall below 85% by the end of next week.
While the race may not be decided by Election Day, it is clear that tens of millions of people are waiting until the final day of the campaign to cast their votes.
Campaigns that grasp this simple fact most thoroughly may have a small but real advantage.
Political analyst and commentator Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy.
