Early voting surge seen as advantage for Harris campaign

The Harris campaign and Democratic groups are working hard to push their supporters to vote early in this year's election. 

Team Harris wants to maximize its early advantage, especially given that some Democratic-leaning groups — notably young people — are seen as unreliable voters come Election Day. 

The hope among Democrats is that an early-vote advantage could bolster Vice President Harris against the traditional GOP edge among Election Day voters.

There are encouraging signs for Team Harris so far, at least if the assumption is that early-vote numbers can be taken as an indicator of overall voter enthusiasm.

In Georgia, around 310,000 votes were cast Tuesday alone. The secretary of state’s office noted that this was a massive increase over the figures for first-day voting either in the 2020 presidential election or at the 2022 midterms, each of which saw roughly 135,000 Georgians vote.

Early voting “helps Democrats,” Democratic strategist Basil Smikle said, adding that he believed this was one of the reasons why former President Trump specifically, and Republicans generally, have in the past cast aspersions on some methods of early voting, including the widespread use of drop boxes.

Trump has been notably less hostile to early-voting methods this year — a change that is perhaps as close as he will come to a tacit admission that his previous rhetoric hurt his own party.

That said, Democrats are still more inclined to take heart from strong early-voting numbers.

Smikle said that such data points are “certainly a symbol of an engaged electorate, an electorate that has been paying attention, especially in these past few weeks, and wants very passionately to engage in our democracy.”

Harris and top surrogates have been crisscrossing the country this week, focusing on the pivotal battleground states where early voting has begun or is about to start. Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), traveled to North Carolina for the first day of early voting on Thursday, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff traveled to Georgia, where early voting began on Tuesday.

The vice president on Monday told a rally in Erie, Pa., to vote early, highlighting how the county is seen as a bellwether for how the country votes. 

“In Erie County, you can vote early in person,” she said. “Now is the time to make your plan to vote, and if you have already received your ballot in the mail, please do not wait.”

Early voting rose sharply in 2020, when President Biden won the White House amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health concerns made more people inclined to use other forms of voting rather than going to the ballot box in person on Election Day. 

Even as the pandemic is receding in memory, the pattern established at the 2020 election seems to be holding.

Trump isn’t ceding the early-voting battlefield this time around, however. He visited Georgia on Tuesday — a visit clearly timed to tie in with the start of early voting in the Peach State. 

“Early mail-in voting in your state is now underway, and early in-person is underway. But I’ll tell you what, I’m hearing very good things,” Trump said during the rally in Atlanta.

Last Sunday, in a social media post, Trump encouraged Arizonans to vote immediately once the early voting period began the next day. 

“GO VOTE the minute the polls open tomorrow, and get everyone you know to cast their ballots for Trump and Republicans at every level!” Trump wrote. 

Democrats see their push to spur early voting as part of a bigger effort to increase overall turnout. Broadly speaking, party partisans and political scientists tend to believe that high-turnout elections favor Democrats and low-turnout elections favor Republicans. 

The GOP tends to be more confident of its overall chances in midterm elections than in presidential years, for instance. That’s because the most reliable voting blocs, including older people, tend to lean Republican, while groups with spottier records of turnout, including young people and to some extent voters of color, tend to lean Democratic.

Early voting also allows campaigns to keep tabs on who has voted, in order to focus their get-out-the-vote efforts on those voters who are still outstanding until Election Day.

“For Democrats, the reason why you want to early vote is because you’ve got a voter file, you know the people who are your reliable voters, every one of those voters who vote early — you think, 'OK, I don’t have to worry about that voter anymore,' and you don’t have to worry that something is going to happen on Election Day like someone’s kid gets sick or car breaks down,” said Jamal Simmons, a former communications director to Harris.

Some Democrats chalk up the push for early voting from the Harris campaign as a way to just make sure that their core supporters vote. These voices note that taking the time to vote on the first Tuesday in November can be tough for some Americans.

“A vote is a vote, whether it's early or on day of. We have a lot of voters who have a lot of day demands on their lives, right? Which isn't to say Republicans don't, but we have to get those votes in, because it might be hard for them to vote on Election Day,” said Al Mottur, a Democratic strategist and bundler at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. “It’s always good to bank the votes if you can get them and use the enthusiasm that exists.”

Mark Longabaugh, another Democratic strategist, agreed.

“From a technical standpoint, when you are able to identify your voters and get them a ballot, you are going a long way toward banking the ballot,” Longabaugh said. “If you are doing good, solid, grassroots politics, you want people to vote early if you can because it’s banking a vote.”

But Longabaugh noted — as did other sources interviewed for this story — that there are dangers in extrapolating too much about the election’s outcome from early-vote numbers. 

The veteran strategist noted that, at the start of his political career, Republicans typically fared better in early voting, partly because the GOP tended to have a better-financed get-out-the-vote effort in general. His larger point was that early voting patterns are in a constant state of flux.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said that optimism about Harris’s chances based upon initial early-vote turnout is predicated on the belief that patterns from 2020 will repeat themselves.

“That time it favored Democrats. Trump and the Republicans have been very mixed-message in terms of early voting, and certainly many Republicans are very leery of it,” Zelizer said. “But Republicans have also been working to get people to vote early."

“It is really hard to read the tea leaves, and the dynamics seem a little different this time,” he added. “I don’t think we can read into this that it is automatically good for Democrats.”

For now, though, Democrats will cling to the optimism that the strong early-vote numbers are providing.

“I think it’s encouraging,” Longabaugh said. “Anytime in a battleground state that the vote is robust, I think that’s probably good for Democrats.”