Article by:
Jeff Amy and Nicholas Riccardi
STONE MOUNTAIN - Flags telling people to "Vote Here" fluttered in not only English, but Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots in the 2024 election.
One by one, the voters who turned out Thursday added to what’s become a colossal heap of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, which ended Friday, has been so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day dawns on Tuesday.
"I normally try to vote early because I’m a mailman, and it’s hard to me to get over here on an election day," said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump Thursday before scattering leaves as he departed in his red pickup truck.
Voters like King are part of the reason early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it.
In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from voting early, preferring to do it on Election Day. This year, Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far, Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Though they’ve increased their mail voting too, it’s been at a much lower rate.
"The Trump effect is real," said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group that focuses on election policy.
So far about 64 million people have cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data.
Early vote data, of course, does not tell you who will win an election. It doesn’t tell you who the voters support, only basic demographic information and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic may seem unusually energized because it dominates the early vote, only to have no more voters left to turn out on Election Day.
Campaigns encourage early voting because it lets them "bank" their most reliable supporters, freeing resources to turn out lower-propensity backers on Election Day...Read full article
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