As of Tuesday afternoon, nearly 33 million people have voted since early voting windows opened in some states over a month ago, according to tracking by the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Around half of those votes have been cast in person, while the other half were submitted by mail.
Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who runs the Election Lab, stresses to TIME that early voting data cannot in and of itself be relied on to predict the outcome of the elections. But he says it can reveal other informative aspects of voting behavior.
Here are some of the notable trends emerging in the early voting data as Election Day nears.
This data is only available for the 27 states that have a formal party registration system, and signifies only the party with which a voter is registered, not the candidates selected on their ballot.
Republicans are anticipated to make up ground on Election Day, as they have in recent years. A Pew Research survey conducted following the 2024 midterm elections showed that nearly 40% of registered Republican voters cast their ballot in person on Election Day, compared to 28% of registered Democratic voters.
Polling has shown, however, that Democratic engagement and enthusiasm is higher than it is for Republicans in the lead-up to the elections. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll released on Tuesday, 52% of likely voters said they would back the Democratic candidate in their House district, while 44% would back the Republican candidate. Independent likely voters favored Democratic candidates by 13 points.
Read More: Polls Point to a Blue Wave. Here's Why Republicans Say They're Wrong
“This is a story about Democrats who voted in 2024 persisting, and Republicans who voted in 2024 so far at least staying home,” he says.
Fraga says that Republicans are frustrated with what he describes as “failures” of the Trump Administration, which he asserts have decreased GOP voters’ support for their party and led them to stay home rather than casting ballots early.
Simon Rosenberg, a long-time Democratic strategist, contends that independents are also more likely to be voting in favor of Democrats, given recent polling, which has shown that more independent likely voters support Democratic candidates. One YouGov poll found that 54% of independents said they’d vote for Democratic candidates, versus 27% who said they’d vote for Republican candidates. Another PBS/NPR/Marist poll showed that independents favored Democrats by a margin of 25 points.
Hispanic voters are turning out early in higher numbers than other recent elections
Rosenberg says that the most significant data coming out of early voting is the number of Hispanic people voting early.
“It's almost certain that this heightened performance will carry over through Election Day, and that this will become one of the big storylines of the election,” he says. “It's a universal trend that we're seeing all across the country.”
In one of the most closely watched—and expensive—Senate races this year, James Talarico is vying to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988 in a tightly contested battle against the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The state's Hispanic population, one of the highest in the U.S. per capita, represents 24% of the vote as of Monday, according to VoteHub, a percentage point higher than the share it made up in the final vote tally in the 2024 election. Another analysis reported by The Texas Tribune showed that the Hispanic early vote in Texas has already surpassed the early vote numbers from 2024 and 2022.
As a result, McDonald contends that “we're going to see larger swings to the Democrats in more diverse states.”
Another Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Oct. 5 showed that just 24% of Hispanic Americans approved of Trump’s performance in the White House, the lowest such rating the President has received across both of his presidential terms. And just 52% of Hispanic voters who responded to the poll planned to vote Democratic, double the level of support for Republicans among the demographic.
How predictive is early voting data?
He notes that early voting returns showed Kamala Harris leading in the 2024 presidential election, and that she still lost after a strong gain in Republican turnout for Trump.
Fraga says that in general, political scientists are skeptical of using early voting data to predict election outcomes. This has been especially true, he notes, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw Democrats cast early votes by mail at a significantly higher rate than Republicans, who were more likely to vote early at polls, a dynamic that made it harder to draw on the early vote to confidently predict outcomes on Election Day.
“It's not determinative. It's not going to predict what's going to happen,” Rosenberg says. “But every campaign in the country right now is living and dying on this early vote data.”
Richard Hall contributed reporting.
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