Democrats rely on early voting and mail-in voting as they beat the bushes for weeks to get their voters to the polls. In 2020, 70% of the electorate cast votes before election day. Democrats benefitted from the higher turnout and have made a pandemic-era measure into a permanent fixture in elections.
Even Republicans have now tentatively embraced early voting. Will it make as big a difference in the outcome as it did in 2020?
Early indications are that early voting is way down from 2020. At this point in 2020, 45% more voters had already cast their ballots. Some of that is due to changes in the start dates from early voting.
Perhaps more significantly requests for mail-in ballots are down a whopping 58% from this point in 2020.in states that don't send mail ballots to all voters.
Certainly, in states ravaged by the hurricanes, early voting is far down the list of storm victim's priorities. The point is that the numbers in all states are expected to improve but come nowhere near what we saw in 2020.
The drop is smaller but still noticeable in the three Midwestern blue-wall states. Mail-ballot requests are down 59% in Wisconsin, 36% in Pennsylvania and 24% in Michigan.
This is troubling news for Democrats as their voters have in recent years dominated among mail ballots.
Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania because he built up a 1.4-million-vote advantage with absentee voters, just enough to let him survive Donald Trump’s 1.33-million-vote lead with Election Day balloters.
The fact there will likely be as many as 1 million fewer mail ballots in Pennsylvania this year means Democrats will have to run a superior ground game simply to hold level with their 2020 showing.
In Virginia, early voting is down only 4%. But the early voting turnout in Republican congressional districts is massive while turnout in the heavily Democratic northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. is way down.
The inner DC suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria each gave Biden more than 80% of the vote, yet the number of early votes cast in each is less than half that counted at the same point four years ago.
That’s not the case in Trump’s best counties. He carried 10 rural counties in the far western part of the state with 80% or more in 2020. They are also 90% or more white and with no more than 24% possessing a four-year college degree.
This area is so MAGA, Trump won between 85% and 96% of the vote in this year’s GOP primary against Nikki Haley. They are exactly the sort of people said to be open to election=fraud conspiracies and highly suspicious of early voting.
Yet early voting here is up from 2020.
So what's happening? Republicans are participating in early voting with a vengeance. And no matter how the Harris campaign wants to spin the early voting numbers, they can't escape the fact that this is bad news.
It may indicate an across-the-board decline in Democratic turnout. That would be curtains for the Democrats, not just for Harris but for their prospects of holding the Senate and taking over the House.
The early voting numbers will improve. But it's hard to see how they can even come close to the number of early voters who cast ballots before election day in 2020.
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