Some 70 million Americans have already cast their votes in the historic US election that culminates on Tuesday, and as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for the final showdown, it remains to be seen how early voting trends will turn out. There is a heated debate over what this means.
The race remains a virtual dead heat, with both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossing the country in intense last-minute campaigning — even head-to-head national polls will actually decide the winner. Even in seven key battleground states. The race for the White House.
But as Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris have marketed themselves to a minority of voters who are now undecided, thousands of voters have already passed through various procedures in the United States that allow early voting. Millions of Americans vote in elections.
With so much at stake in the election, both Republicans and Democrats are already trying to gather information that could point to their side’s advantage as Election Day approaches, and it’s hard to see what the big numbers will mean. There has been intense speculation as to what it means.
Harris’ campaign has some important information from the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. The huge state, which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west, is part of the Rust Belt, which is dominated by former manufacturing cities and is seen as perhaps the most important electoral region.
Almost all the most likely routes to victory for both candidates include picking up Rust Belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.
Voters 65 and older account for nearly half of all early voting in the state, and registered Democrats account for about 58% of older voters compared to 35% for Republicans. That’s a big lead in a demographic that typically leans toward Trump.
At the same time, women have a 10-point lead over men when it comes to early voting in Pennsylvania, according to a Politico website analysis using data from the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project. A separate analysis by NBC showed an even wider gap in support for women in the state, at 13 points.
Harris and her team are hoping to see a strong representation of women in the election, as she and her team have made the loss of reproductive rights a central part of their campaign after the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights. are. In this election, women were more likely to support Democrats, while men were more likely to support Republicans, so signs of high female turnout could be good news for the vice president.
Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek: “The gender gap is a growing concern among Democrats, especially if many states include abortion rights amendments on their 2024 ballots. “It provides hope and is a major reason for concern among Republicans.”
But Republicans also see signs of hope in early voting trends. It’s a sign that America’s divisive elections are still proving unpredictable, despite nearly two years of intense campaigning by both parties.
In Arizona, an important battleground state in the so-called “Sunbelt” of electoral battlegrounds, the number of male voters is increasing, reflecting the Republican Party’s strategy to send men who have never voted before to the polls. This indicates that it may be effective. Arizona registered 86,000 new voters last week, far surpassing the narrow margin by which Joe Biden defeated Trump in the state in 2020 and making up the largest percentage of new voters. was a male Republican.
Overall, more Republicans have historically voted early and more Democrats have chosen to go to the polls. One reason for this is that President Trump and some of his allies continue to push back on their bases of fraud and conspiracy, even though professional Republican campaigners are encouraging their supporters to go to the polls before Election Day. They are attacking early voting with false claims.
There are certainly signs that Republicans will head to the polls early in 2024 in droves.
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In Georgia, another key Sunbelt battleground in the Deep South, there are strong signs of a significant increase in early Republican voters. According to Georgia Vote, more than 700,000 people who had already voted in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, but this is because many of them This is seen as a sign that he may be a Republican. At the same time, Georgia’s top three voting counties are rural areas that Trump easily won in 2020.
“There are a lot of voters who voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020…I believe they are Trump supporters because most of them…are pretty strong strongholds of the Republican Party. ,” Georgia Lieutenant Governor Bert Jones told Fox News.
Of course, as the voting patterns of both parties change, any early voting advantage for either Democrats or Republicans could quickly be reversed on Election Day, when tens of millions of voters will go to the polls in person. There is also gender.
After all, the 2024 race remains completely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, and after a slight decline in support for Harris in October, the national poll now has her at 48% and Trump at 47%. They maintained a one-point advantage, essentially the same as last week. And most polls are within the margin of error.
Even in the battleground states, fierce competition continues. In Pennsylvania, the candidates are neck-and-neck with 48 percent, while in two other Rust Belt states (Michigan and Wisconsin), Harris leads by one point. Meanwhile, Trump has a narrow lead in the Sunbelt, with a 1% lead in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and less than 1 percentage point in Nevada.
But one wild card for both campaigns is the Muslim vote angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters support Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president, while 41% support Harris. are. President Trump’s approval rating was 10%.
In theory, if there is a difference in support for Mr. Stein as there was in 2016, some key battleground states, such as Michigan, could swing toward Mr. Trump if the race is close.
