The News
The first two days of early voting in Georgia — a key battleground state — saw more than 500,000 people cast their vote, a record, with many voting in person. Thirty-four other states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona, have also started early voting, including mail-in ballots.
Georgia is one of seven swing states that most analysts believe will decide the election’s outcome. Former President Donald Trump narrowly lost the state in 2020 to Joe Biden, and now faces criminal charges there for allegedly trying to overturn that result. In the three weeks before Nov. 5, most polls suggest the state — and the national vote — is a coin flip.
As to what the early voting numbers can tell about the outcome of the race, experts are skeptical it is much of anything. That said, both campaigns have stressed the importance of early voting, particularly among the parties’ bases, with Donald Trump’s campaign now switching its focus to turning out a swath of the electorate that is sympathetic to him but doesn’t usually vote.
SIGNALS
Trump campaign puts more emphasis on early voting this time
Donald Trump has repeatedly derided mail-in voting, describing it as “fraudulent” in 2020 following Biden’s win. However, the former president has recently encouraged his supporters to fill in mail-in ballots, potentially swaying some to vote early, experts told The Miami Herald. In Georgia, the Republican Party chair Josh McKoon said boosting early voting would enable the party to spend the last weeks before the election appealing to those Republican-leaning Georgians who don’t usually vote.
Harris campaign’s big ground game aims to get early voters out
The Harris campaign is running “an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades,” The New York Times wrote. In North Carolina, the campaign has focused on early voting as a means of “locking in votes,” local outlet WBTV noted, with several high-profile campaign events and a Bill Clinton bus tour, as well as the traditional door knocking and phone bank campaigns, all aimed to get people to the polls. “The national discourse kind of falls on deaf ears if it doesn’t feel real and localized,” Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, told the Times. “Ultimately you’re trying to have a cohesive conversation with a voter across many modes to connect the dots.”
Pandemic makes comparisons to 2020 hard
Early voting trends will likely yield little insight for either the Trump or Harris campaign, CNN’s election forecaster Harry Enten noted, adding that “many who try to use early vote trends to predict fail.” Comparisons to 2020 are also somewhat futile, since the COVID-19 pandemic led voters to vote early or by mail in greater numbers, FiveThirtyEight wrote. More than 70% of voters cast their ballots early, a University of Florida political scientist found, despite a “clear partisan divide” between Democrats — who tend to vote early or by mail — and Republicans — who favor on-the-day voting, perhaps indicating a more general trend toward early voting, indicating little about the final result, NPR wrote.