Published October 11, 2024
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.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.