Early voting is down and the numbers hold bad news for Democrats
The dramatic rise in early voting has led many to think the election might be effectively over days or weeks before Election Day.The data thus far show that won’t be true — and the numbers aren’t comforting for Democrats.Early voting is nowhere near what some people estimated: 4.2 million Americans have already cast their ballots, per John Couvillon, a Republican political strategist who provides daily updates on early and mail voting.That sounds like a lot, but it’s a pittance compared with the 158.6 million votes ultimately cast in 2020.More important, it’s significantly less than this point in 2020: Early voting is down 45%, Couvillon’s numbers show.The number of early votes will rise substantially in the next two weeks as some states send out their mail ballots and others open in-person early-voting centers.
But the share of votes cast early is still likely to be much lower even after this happens.Virginia, for example, has had in-person early voting since late September.People are coming out, as 459,000 have voted in person as of Oct.
10.That is down roughly 4%, however, from the same point in 2020.The bigger news is the significant decline in requests for mail ballots.Those are down by 58% from 2020 in states that don’t send mail ballots to all voters.The drop is especially steep in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, with declines of 84% and 75% respectively.Some of that is surely due to the devastation Hurricane Helene caused, but the largest population centers of both states were mainly unaffected.Voters here simply do not want to vote by mail when they have in-person early voting widely available.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-millio...