Early voting turnout so far in 2024 appears to have increased among Republicans as well as Democrats in a reversal from the 2020 race for the White House, when Donald Trump told his supporters not to trust the early voting process and a majority of the early ballots cast went to Joe Biden.
This election cycle, the Republican Party has urged voters to cast early ballots for Trump and down-ballot GOP candidates. Trump himself has encouraged supporters to vote early in person. He has also criticized mail-in voting and continued to make claims about voter fraud that have not been supported by evidence.
“Trump changed his rhetoric with respect to early voting. He is basically giving a greenlight to his supporters,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida. “Republicans seem to be voting in greater numbers earlier than they did in the past.”
During the pandemic in 2020, just 27 percent of voters said they voted in person at the polls on Election Day, according to a Pew study. Eighty-two percent of voters who supported Joe Biden said they voted before Election Day. In contrast, 62 percent of Trump supporters said they voted early, either in person or by mail.
The early vote turnout suggests the Democratic Party‘s advantage is shrinking in 2024.
North Carolina, a key battleground state, set a first-day early voting record with 353,000 votes cast on Oct. 17, breaking the previous record of 348,559 votes on the first day of early voting in 2020. Overall, more than 1.7 million people have voted early in North Carolina, according to data from the state’s board of elections.
Registered Republicans have cast 34.2 percent of the early ballots in North Carolina, according to an analysis by the University of Florida’s Elections Lab, which tracks turnout. Democrats have cast 34 percent of the early ballots, and 31.8 percent of the votes have been cast by voters who are registered with a third party or are unaffiliated.
In 2020, Republicans cast just 31 percent of the total absentee mail ballot and in-person early vote in North Carolina, while Democrats accounted for 37 percent of the overall early vote, state data shows.
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledges supporters after speaking at a campaign rally on October 22, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats have cast 62 percent of the more than 1 million early mail-in ballots, according to state data. Republicans account for 28 percent of the mail-in ballots returned to the state so far — an increase, if it holds, from the 23 percent of total mail-in ballots cast by Republicans in the state in 2020.
In Georgia, another critical swing state, more than 2.1 million people cast early ballots as of Oct. 24, according to the latest data from the secretary of state’s office.
The turnout includes a record 313,403 people who voted on the first day of early voting on Oct. 15, more than double the number of votes cast on the first day of early voting in 2020. Voters don’t register with political parties in Georgia, but early turnout is up across the state in both right and left-leaning counties.
Six of the seven main battleground states that will determine the 2024 election have some form of early voting. Overall, more than 17 million early ballots have been cast so far nationwide.
Newsweek reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment.
Harris pointed to the surge in early voting during a campaign swing through Michigan last week on the first day of in-person early voting in Detroit.
“We’re seeing record turnout” in early voting in states like Georgia and North Carolina, Harris said. But she added, “I don’t yet have enough data to tell you who’s voting for who.”
Elections experts said the increase in early turnout among registered voters from both parties is a sign of a healthy election system. But some warned it’s too early to draw specific conclusions without knowing which candidate won the early vote and by what margin.
“Every state where early votes are cast” has seen high turnout so far, said David Becker, the head of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, “but there’s very little we can take from this” in terms of the final outcome.
Democrats in battleground states conceded early turnout among Republicans is up. But party strategists said they expect Democratic turnout to surge in coming days as more Black voters, young people and other left-leaning groups cast ballots ahead of Election Day. Democrats also argued a high-turnout election would help Harris overall, the same way record turnout benefited Biden four years ago.
Early turnout may be up among Republicans, said Amy Chapman, a Democratic strategist who served as the 2008 Obama campaign’s Michigan state director, but the party is still not back to its historic position of having reliable early voters.
“Trump killed that, and it’s going to take a while for the party to recover from that,” Chapman said.
