According to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voter tracker, as of 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, nearly 23 million Americans had already cast their ballots in the 2024 election. Over 9.3 million people had voted in-person while 13.6 million had returned a mail ballot. The site notes that nationwide, voters have requested a total of 62,714,414 mail ballots so far this election cycle.
Noting the increase in early voting by Republicans compared to the 2020 election, veteran journalist Mark Halperin made an extremely bold statement. He told viewers on his podcast, “The Morning Meeting,” on Tuesday, “If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we will almost certainly know BEFORE Election Day who’s going to win the election. … If these numbers hold up in the states where we can even partially understand what the data is like, we’ll know that Donald Trump is going to be president on Election Day.”
Halperin added that tracking the early vote is even more important than watching the current polls. “It’s giving us insight into a variety of factors that are accounting for a Republican overperformance by various metrics in the early voting in the battleground states.”
(Please note that Halperin is extremely well-connected in the political world. He was the first to report that President Joe Biden would drop out of the race shortly after the Biden campaign insisted he would stay the course. Halperin previously served as a political editor at ABC News and as a political analyst at MSNBC. He is not a conservative.)
The full podcast can be viewed below. The relevant portion begins at the 4:20 mark.
Halperin began with a story from Nevada election expert Jon Ralston, who tracks early voting trends in the state on his website, The Daily Indy. Startled by the size of the Republican turnout so far, Ralston reported on Tuesday that if these trends continue, Vice President Kamala Harris will be in “serious trouble” in the state. According to Ralston, “A few more days like this, though, and the Democratic bedwetting will reach epic proportions.” He wrote:
Here’s your stat for the day: In the 15 rural counties, in-person voting, which is about 37 percent of the rural vote, the Rs lead the Ds by 73 percent to 11 percent. I kid you not.In rural mail ballots, the Rs lead the Ds by a wide margin, 46-28, but those in-person numbers are startling. They account for about 8,000 of the Rs nearly 12,000-votes lead in the rurals, which are punching above their weight with 13 percent of the vote (nearly 3 points above their percentage of reg voters).The R lead in rural Nevada is more than double the D lead in urban Nevada….So what does this mean? It means Kamala Harris has to win indies by close to double digits if this turnout scenario holds. That is, unless she holds her base several points better than Trump holds his, which is possible but not necessarily likely. This is how the Dems still, think they hold on: They believe a lot of the indies, especially in Clark, are their indies.
Halperin warned viewers – again – not to overread the early vote as “it can change” and “we don’t know who is voting.” Having said that, Halperin noted that “every analyst” he had spoken to in the past 24 hours told him that, “if this continues, Donald Trump can’t lose. Because the Democrats can’t possibly do well enough on Election Day. … Every state is either bad for Democrats or not good for Democrats.”
Sean Spicer, a one-time White House Press Secretary for Trump and a regular on the podcast, called the data “unbelievable.”
“Like it’s almost too good to be true on our side,” he said. “So I don’t want to get giddy or excited. But when someone like Ralston,” whom he noted had not been a friend to Republicans over the decades, “has to admit something like this, that’s a big deal.”
“The folks in North Carolina I spoke to and the folks in Georgia, are absolutely giddy,” Spicer added.
The men cited the Republican Party’s significant get out the vote effort ahead of this election for the increase in early voter turnout. In addition, they pointed out that the voter rolls in many states have been cleaned up thanks to the efforts of red-state officials and activists across the country.
Whatever the reason for the spike in Republican participation in early voting, it is good news indeed. Let’s hope it continues.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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