Analyst Mark Halperin predicted that if the early voting trends hold in which a large number of Republican voters are showing up in key battleground states, Donald Trump will win. Early voting started in many states and according to reports Republicans are outperforming Democrats in early voting in battleground states like Nevada and North Carolina.”If the early vote numbers stay the way they are — and that’s a big if — we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Halperin said Tuesday.
“Make no mistake, if these numbers hold up in the states where we can partially understand the data, we’ll know Donald Trump is going to win on Election Day,” he added.
In North Carolina, Democrats had an edge of more than 30 percentage points in early voting at this point in 2022, but this time they are ahead by just 1 percentage point.
In Nevada, 1,000 more Republicans than Democrats have cast early ballots this year.
How crucial are the early voting numbers?
Halperin said early voting numbers need to be tracked “day to day” and these figures are “more important than the polls right now” because “it’s giving us insight into a variety of factors that are counting for a Republican overperformance by various metrics in the early voting in the battleground states”.
But one downside of relying too much on these early voting numbers id that it’s not know who they are voting. “It can change. We don’t know exactly who’s casting these ballots, how they are voting etc,” Halperin said.
“But every analyst I’ve talked to in the last 24 hours, including people who speak publicly, say if this continues, Donald Trump can’t lose because the Democrats can’t possibly do well enough on Election Day,” he added.
As many as 21 million Americans have already cast their vote ahead of the election day on November 5.
The latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump leading Harris in all seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
