Around this time four years ago, then-president Donald Trump was talking nonstop about his conviction that mail-in voting would rig the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor.
But in 2024, the Trump team now sees early, absentee, and vote-by-mail turnout from low-propensity voters as essential to victory, with “Swamp the Vote” signs now appearing on the big screen at Trump rallies. Republicans have invested millions this cycle into early vote turnout efforts, and, acting on the advice of his campaign advisers, the GOP nominee is urging his supporters to cast their ballots early to better compete with the Democrats, who have long dominated Republicans on this front.
Data suggest Republican investments in non–Election Day voting — coupled with Trump’s changed rhetoric — are paying dividends in a dead-heat race.
“There’s a lot that you could probably point to in the early voting data and a lot of the voter registration numbers that seem to confirm this idea that Republican voters are energized and enthusiastic heading into this final stretch of the campaign,” says GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights.
As of this writing, nearly 25 million Americans have cast ballots early by mail or in person nationwide, according to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early vote data. And data suggest Republicans aren’t lagging very far behind Democrats on the early-vote front in other states. The early-vote partisan breakdown shows 43 percent of votes have been cast by Democrats, compared to 35 percent by Republicans and 22 percent by voters with no party affiliation, according to data from the states that report early voting by party registration.
Georgia and North Carolina both set record first-day early-vote totals, even after Hurricane Helene ravaged parts of both states. “We’re seeing very strong turnout continue regarding the early vote, so we are hopeful that everybody is going to be able to vote without any hitches,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley said in a recent interview with National Review. In North Carolina, the state legislature “did a really good job of moving very quickly to pass a bill that would allow flexibility for counties where they needed to change locations,” he added.
In the key battleground state of North Carolina, in-person early voting returns had seen a near-even split among party affiliations as of Tuesday. Thirty-five percent of in-person early votes were cast by registered Democrats, another 34 percent were cast by registered Republicans, and registered unaffiliated voters accounted for 31 percent of votes.
“We have seen over the past few days for the daily totals registered Republicans take the lead” in North Carolina, says Michael Bitzer, politics department chair at Catawba College. “So there appears to be a voter reaction to party representatives and former President Trump encouraging folks to bank their ballots early.”
State Republican Party chairmen are singing a similar tune. Take Ohio, for example. Trump carried the Buckeye State by eight points in 2016 and 2020, but Republicans are urging their voters to cast ballots early so that their congressional and Senate nominees in deadlocked races get across the finish line. On the stump, Ohio GOP chairman Alex Triantafilou has come up with a new slogan for GOP voters who are on the fence about voting before Election Day: “It’s OK to vote that way!”
While turnout numbers look strong for Republicans, political experts have cautioned against trying to extrapolate election results from a single voting method. Early voting is “interesting from a ‘how are people engaging in democracy?’ perspective,” but as far as election results, “I don’t think there’s much we can learn from early voting,” said Jacob Smith, assistant professor of political science at Fordham University.
Questions remain about what early vote trends will look like in the final days before November 5, and what the existing data mean for partisan turnout this cycle. Privately, battleground-state Republican operatives have spent months voicing concerns about the Trump campaign’s decision to outsource much of its ground game to the Elon Musk–bankrolled America PAC and Charlie Kirk’s group Turning Point USA, which NR’s Jim Geraghty explains in today’s Morning Jolt.
The Trump campaign staffers dismiss these get-out-the-vote concerns and insist that early vote totals show Republican turnout numbers are well ahead of where they were at this point four years ago.
“You’d rather be in our position than theirs,” the Trump campaign’s political director James Blair told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s too early to start declaring victory, but the swings in our direction are very positive.”
Around NR
• Harris greatly exaggerated her prosecutorial record during her campaign for San Francisco district attorney, according to new reporting from James Lynch. In a flyer obtained by NR, Harris claimed to have 13 years of trial experience and said she had prosecuted hundreds of serious felony cases. But in fact,
she only had ten years of trial experience at the time, and she had prosecuted far fewer serious cases than the “hundreds” she touted, an inconsistency her opponents made light of in the midst of an intense campaign.
• Control of the House could remain unknown past Election Day if races in slow-counting California make or break a narrow House majority, Dominic Pino says:
California’s vote-counting lethargy matters more for the House of Representatives. Whichever party wins the House majority, it is likely to be slim, and there are only so many competitive House races to begin with. Of the 27 House races currently rated as toss-ups by Cook Political Report, five are in California, the most of any single state.
• Trump’s stint working at McDonald’s over the weekend is just the latest example of the campaign leaning into his larger-than-life personality in the final days of the presidential race, writes Audrey Fahlberg:
The drive-thru stunt was an eleventh-hour effort to troll Harris, who says she worked at a McDonald’s in the Bay Area of San Francisco but has gotten flak from Republicans for declining to provide many details about her time working there. But perhaps more important, it served as part of a broader effort to showcase the GOP nominee’s talent for casual in-person interactions in a dead-heat race where momentum may prove pivotal in getting across the finish line.
• Despite Harris’s best efforts to create a permission structure for Republicans to support her next month, Noah Rothman says it’s going to take more than that to win over conservatives:
We must assume that the Harris campaign believes committing the time and resources to GOP outreach will bear fruit. But the voters it is targeting do not need and are not soliciting anyone’s “permission.” No one has to hold their hand and gently guide them to the conclusion preferred by the Harris campaign. They need a reason to vote for Harris, and she hasn’t given them many.
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