The early vote numbers are a little scary for vice president Kamala Harris, Jim Messina, who ran the Obama campaign in 2012, told on MSNBC adding that several of his friends called him panicking as the early voting numbers indicate a surge in Republican vote turnout.
“Republicans didn’t do what they did last time,” Messina continued. “Last time, Trump said don’t early vote so they didn’t. Republicans do have an advantage in early vote numbers. When the early votes come in, it’s going to look a little bit different than 2020 and that’s scary.”
Messina said that Democrats are pleased with the early turnout of two voting demographics that the Harris camp has been banking on: women, and younger voters. “Women voters make up 55 per cent of early voters, and in the past 10 days, young voters in these battleground states are coming out in what looks to be, for early voters, historic numbers.”
Messina is not losing hope and said he thinks Harris is holding strong in the last leg of the campaign.
“But when you look at some of the early vote numbers, it has led lots of your friends and my friends to call me panicking,” he continued. “And I do think it is true: The Republicans have done a better job than they did last time on early vote.”
About 75 million people have cast ballots in the early voting period that was held in the last few weeks in many states. Projections from early voting indicate that the overall turnout for the election will probably be between the roughly 60 per cent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016 and the two-thirds of eligible voters who voted in 2020, according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor.
Figures collected by the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voter tracker show that 42,664,880 people have voted early in person, while 35,376,421 mail-in ballots were returned as of the morning of Monday, November 4. This figure is nearly half the total 158.4 million votes cast in the 2020 election. The data suggests that Republicans are now more willing to cast their votes early than in previous elections, instead of waiting until Election Day. In past elections, Democrats favored early in-person and mail-in voting.