Polls show Harris with big early-vote lead — despite GOP gains

Nationally, Harris leads Trump by between 19 and 29 points among those who say they’ve already voted, which is more than Hillary Clinton in 2016

The 2024 election has set records for pre-Election Day votes. And Republicans are increasingly excited about numbers that show their side has embraced early voting much more than they did in 2020. Elon Musk has gone so far as to predict that these numbers spell victory for Donald Trump.

But there are plenty of reasons not to overinterpret the data Musk and his allies are citing, as The Post’s Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner wrote Wednesday. Those include that 2020 was an unusual election held during a historic pandemic, that many early votes are “cannibalized” from voters who otherwise would have turned out on Election Day anyway, and — perhaps most notably — that we don’t actually know who these people are voting for.

Well, actually, we do have some clues about who they’re voting far. Polls are increasingly asking voters whether they voted early and publishing the breakdowns. And the picture for Republicans isn’t as rosy there as they might want to believe.

Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be banking a significant lead heading into Election Day, potentially bigger than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 — for whatever that’s worth.

Check out how Harris and Trump stack up according to The Washington Post’s presidential polling averages of seven battleground states. We’ve identified eight possible paths to victory based on the candidates’ current standing in the polls.

We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most important issues, including abortion, economic policy and immigration.

The Post broke down the eight races and three long shots that could determine whether Democrats lose control of the Senate. Ten competitive races will determine whether Republicans retain their narrow control of the House

Recent national ABC News-Ipsos, New York Times-Siena College and CNN polls show Harris with between a 19- and a 29-point advantage among voters who say they’ve already cast ballots. Those margins range from a 59-40 edge in the Times-Siena poll to a 62-33 edge in the ABC-Ipsos one.

All of them are well shy of Biden’s margins in late 2020 polls, when Democrats embraced mail voting and Trump attacked it and persuaded his supporters not to do it.

But they are better than Clinton did in an arguably more comparable election, in 2016. Back then, late Washington Post-ABC News and McClatchy-Marist College polls showed Clinton leading by between eight and 16 points among those who said they had cast ballots early.

The election, of course, is decided in the swing states. But there, the polls suggest Harris is also banking a sizable advantage heading into Election Day.

Polls from Marist, CNN, Fox News and USA Today-Suffolk University show that her leads among those who say they’ve already cast ballots look like this:

this:

• Arizona: 9-12 points


• Georgia: 7-10 points


• Michigan: 26-39 points


• North Carolina: 2-6 points


• Pennsylvania: 17-35 points


• Wisconsin: 22-60 points

The only state where a major, high-quality poll has shown Harris actually trailing among those who have already cast ballots is CNN’s poll of Nevada, which shows Trump leading by six points.

All of these margins pale next to Biden’s leads in late 2020 polls of the same states. But again, they’re much closer to 2016. Hillary Clinton had only a slight lead among early voters in Arizona and Nevada, for instance. A late poll in Michigan showed her margin there at 27 points. And a late Siena poll

of North Carolina showed her ahead by nine points among early voters.

It’s tough to compare the other states given that they either weren’t that competitive in 2016 (Georgia) and that early and mail voting weren’t prevalent before 2020 (in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

This is a limited number of polls, and the subsamples of those who say they’ve already voted have larger margins of error. These data are prone to being off just like polls are more generally.

But the sum total is that it looks as if Harris will at least go into Election Day with a substantial lead banked among those who have already cast ballots. It’s good for Republicans that this margin doesn’t appear close to as large as it was in 2020, but it’s still a substantial lead that they’ll have to make up.

They did so in 2016, when many wagered that the early vote was among the many strong signs for Clinton.

Maybe the lesson is that we should just wait and see.

WASHINGTON POST