After weeks of early and mail voting, at least 66 million Americans have already cast their ballots for next week’s election, a historic figure that has upended expectations about Election Day and which states could decide the presidential contest.
The massive number, which includes voters who have cast ballots either in person or by mail, has stunned election officials and campaign operatives. It equals close to half of the total turnout in 2016 — all but ensuring, with early voting continuing through the weekend, that the majority of ballots will be cast before Election Day for the first time in history.
The overwhelming demand to vote now — which has led to long lines nationwide — reflects a widespread sense of urgency to chart the country’s course over the next four years, despite the voting challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. And it puts this year’s election on pace for a historic rate of participation not seen since the early 1900s.
For now, the early numbers overwhelmingly favor Democrats in 16 of 19 states that provide such data. But the gap between Democratic and Republican voters has narrowed in recent days in several battleground states, and the campaigns of President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden noted that more Republicans are expected to vote on Nov. 3, Election Day, than Democrats, according to numerous polls.
The question is how many more.
“The early vote is showing two things: We’re clearly headed to record-level turnout, nationally and likely in just about every state,” said Tom Bonier, the head of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. “And it’s clearly showing us that Democrats are highly engaged and will be themselves setting record levels of turnout.”
Bonier emphasized that Republicans are also motivated to vote. ''The open question,'' he said, “is whether that level of Republican engagement and enthusiasm can match or exceed [that of] Democrats. That’s the part of the equation that we can’t solve until Election Day.”
On Monday, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters that the president will win the Election Day vote easily, in part because of an extensive get-out-the-vote operation. A person close to the Biden campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking, said it’s ''absolutely possible'' for Trump to catch up on Election Day.
The dynamic creates a significantly unsettled landscape as turnout has surged across the country — in cities and rural America, in battlegrounds long expected to decide who the next president will be, and in unexpected places that have not had competitive races in years. It also means that Election Day will feel substantially different from those in past years, with a smaller, more Republican turnout.
As of Monday night, the number of ballots cast had exceeded 60 percent of the 2016 vote in at least 14 states, including Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington, according to state data and the US Elections Project, which tracks early voting.
The project, run by Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, tallied 66.2 million ballots cast as of Tuesday morning, including 22 million in-person early votes.
Nowhere has the spike been more unexpected than in Texas, where more than 7.8 million voters had cast ballots as of Tuesday morning — more than 86 percent of the overall vote in 2016 — and where nine counties have surpassed their 2016 totals. Among them: deeply conservative Denton, northwest of Dallas; fast-growing Williamson, outside of Austin; and McCulloch, population 8,000, at the center of the state.
Both parties said excitement is evident in Republican strongholds as well as Democratic ones, making it difficult to glean an advantage for Trump or Biden. A Washington Post average of October polls shows the two candidates about even in the state; Trump won Texas by nine points in 2016.
Fewer than 9 million Texans voted in 2016, out of 19 million voting-age adults at the time — a low turnout rate that Democrats said reflected the apathy of many of their own supporters.
The surge this year, meanwhile, comes amid a fight over many of the state’s down-ballot races. In the wake of Democratic former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss to Republican Senator Ted Cruz two years ago, a rush of candidates have mounted campaigns in Republican-held districts that had rarely been challenged. Cash has poured into those races, including legislative seats that could flip control of the Texas House.
The profiles of voters who have cast ballots early indicate that this year’s electorate could look very different from four years ago.
Black voters have turned out in large numbers in key states such as Georgia and North Carolina, citing the need to cast ballots at the first possible opportunity.
New voters have also turned out at a remarkable rate: As of Monday, voters who did not participate in 2016 accounted for 25.6 percent of early ballots cast nationally, according to a TargetSmart analysis.
And signs have emerged that young voters are on track to sustain the record turnout they displayed in the 2018 election.
A poll of 18- to 29-year-olds released Monday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School found that 63 percent of respondents said they would definitely be voting in the election, the highest such measure in the 20 years that the poll has been conducted. The finding was far higher than in 2016, when the same survey found that 47 percent of respondents said they would definitely vote.
The poll found that likely voters in the age group favored Biden over Trump 63 percent to 25 percent.