With just five days left until election day, more than 68 million Americans have already cast their ballots, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. But what that data portends about the outcome of next week’s election depends largely on who you ask.
Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump’s campaigns are heading into election week projecting optimism about their chances.
“We're feeling really good with what we're seeing,” a senior Harris campaign official said Thursday. “We are very focused on turning our entire organization to doing everything possible to make sure our votes turn out.”
“President Trump continues to dominate in poll after poll, Republicans have made massive voter registration gains, and we are far outperforming in our share of the early vote relative to two or four years ago across all battleground states,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Scripps News. “Voters know that Kamala Harris has destroyed our country, but President Trump will fix it — and that is why he is well-positioned for victory on November 5."
Behind the spin, however, experts on both sides of the aisle say the race remains extremely close – but that Harris is heading into election day in a strong position.
That might appear inconsistent with initial takeaways from the early vote data; across several battleground states, more Republicans appear to have voted early than Democrats, and Republican are voting early at a significantly higher clip than they were in 2020.
As of Friday evening in Nevada, for example, more than 290,000 registered Republicans have voted so far, while only about 253,000 registered Democrats have cast ballots, according to the market research firm TargetSmart. At this point in 2020, meanwhile, about 13,000 more registered Democrats had voted than had Republicans.
Similar trends are apparent in the early vote data from North Carolina and Georgia, though the latter does not require voters to share their party affiliation when they register so estimating their ideology requires more guesswork.
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Nonetheless, the data might not be as bad for Democrats as it appears. A significant proportion of the Republicans voting early are likely to have voted on election day in 2020, the TargetSmart analysis found, meaning Republicans might not be turning out new voters as much as shifting their votes earlier.
“About 94% of all Republicans who voted in Pennsylvania so far voted in 2020,” said Tom Bonier, TargetSmart’s senior advisor and a longtime Democratic strategist. Republicans aren't “producing new votes,” Bonier added, but rather are “just shifting people who were voting anyhow on Election Day and bringing them out early.
That data mirrors what the Harris campaign is seeing internally too, according to senior campaign advisors. In Nevada, nearly three times more Republican early voters than Democratic early voters previously cast ballots on Election Day, officials said, citing what was described to Scripps News as “modeling is based on voter file data and high-quality tracking surveys.” In Georgia, two times more Republicans who’ve already voted waited until election day last time around.
“They're just shifting the way that they're voting,” a senior Harris campaign official said. “They're going from Election Day voters to voting early, as opposed to bringing new voters into the fold.”
Even some Republicans have conceded that comparing 2024 voting trends to the 2020 presidential race might not be all that fruitful, given that the last election was held during an historic pandemic and voters’ preferences are likely to have shifted since then.
The last presidential election was during Covid and we were in the middle of a pretty wholesale shift in how people voted and when they voted,” a Republican strategist told Scripps News. “I just don't think it necessarily tells a defining story, based on the volume of the early vote this time, that a lot of people are trying to extrapolate from.”
Overall, the total number of early voters who’ve cast ballots so far has declined relative to 2020 numbers – to be expected given the easing of pandemic restrictions. “Every group is actually declining in early vote relative to four years ago,” Bonier said. “It's just a question of which groups have declined more.”
To be sure, there are some positive trends for Trump’s campaign. In Arizona, for example, registration and turnout is particularly strong among white men – a group expected to back Trump by wide margins.
And the Trump campaign has been quick to highlight the slight edge the former president maintains in recent swing-state polls, with the campaign’s pollster Tony Fabrizo noting in a memo that public polling averages put Trump in a significantly better position today than he was in four years ago.
Still, there are other positive signs for Harris, too. Battleground voters who made up their minds in the last week are breaking for Harris by a “double-digit margin,” a senior campaign advisor said Friday. Similarly, there’s evidence that women voters – another group expected to back Harris more than Trump – are turning out in key battlegrounds more than men are.
Taken together, experts agreed that the race remains historically close.
“I have never seen a race that has gone on for this long with as much that has happened that, at least based on the polling, really is a heads-up race,” the Republican strategist said.
Like all elections, who wins will ultimately come down to which voters turn out on election day – and how the campaigns are able to mobilize their supporters. The Harris campaign has invested heavily in this so-called ground game operation, whereas Trump’s team has largely outsourced that effort to Elon Musk and other outside groups.
“No one has any idea how that's going to go,” the Republican strategist noted. “It could go amazingly, or it could not. We just don't know and won't know until it's over.”
Scripps News reporter Haley Bull contributed to this report.
