Over six million Americans have already cast their ballot for November’s election, according to the U.S. Elections Project (USEP).
Early voting has already begun in 27 states, including some critical battlegrounds. Voters have cast hundreds of thousands of ballots in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia, and over one million Americans have already voted in Florida, the nation’s largest swing state, according to USEP data.
![TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump (L) and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden exchange arguments during the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 29, 2020. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)](https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/GettyImages-1228795509-scaled-e1601656643367.jpg)
TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump (L) and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden exchange arguments (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Voters are casting ballots early – both in-person by mail – at much higher rates than in 2016, according to USA Today, with the number of votes cast so far already totaling almost 5% of the entire vote count from the last presidential election, according to The New York Times data.
The totals are even higher in battlegrounds like Florida, where the 1.1 million already-returned ballots amount to approximately 12% of the total votes cast in the state in 2016, the data shows. In Wisconsin, the approximately 576,000 ballots returned would represent almost 20% of the total ballots cast four years ago as well.
The rise in early voting could be concerning for Trump, according to The Washington Post, as the president trails Biden in national and battleground polls. Biden leads Trump by almost 10 points nationwide, according to FiveThirtyEight, a gap that the president needs to close to have any shot at reelection, forecasters say. (RELATED: Battleground Polls Show Massive Shift Among Senior Voters)
Democrats have voted by mail-in ballots at a higher rate than Republicans, the data shows. In the eight states that have reported party registration data, including battlegrounds like Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Democrats have requested just under 22 million ballots compared just over 13 million for Republicans. Democrats have returned almost 1.3 million ballots, while Republicans have returned about 470,000.
Early mail-in voting by party affiliation:
NORTH CAROLINA:
D – 206,334
R – 67,871
No Party – 119,346PENNSYLVANIA:
D – 70,704
R – 14,133
No – 7,345OKLAHOMA: just starting to report
D – 40,783
R – 24,700
No – 8,263Keep going! Organize! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) October 7, 2020
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.