More than half of voters expected to cast early ballot: Gallup
Many Americans have turned out to cast their ballots early in the general election, with more than half of the country’s registered voters having already voted or planning to vote before Election Day, according to a Thursday poll released by Gallup.
This year, 54 percent of registered voters are headed to the polls early, a 10 percent decline from the 2020 presidential election, which came amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Forty-two percent of respondents are planning to cast a vote on Nov. 5, while 34 percent are planning to do so before then and 20 percent have already cast their ballots.
White Republicans have invested heavily in getting out the early vote, Democrats are still outvoting Republicans before Election Day.
The survey showed 63 percent of registered voters who are either Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents have already voted or plan to vote before Election Day, compared with 47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Both parties have said they feel confident about early voting numbers, which topped 50 million in recent days. However, strategists have warned against using premature tallies to predict election results.
About 70 percent of respondents said they are more enthusiastic about the 2024 election, compared to 17 percent who say they are less enthusiastic. Another 11 percent feel the same as previous years and 1 percent had no opinion.
As the race nears the end, the survey measured which campaigns have successfully reached voters.
Forty-two percent of registered voters said they’d been contacted by the Harris campaign by email, phone, in person or mail, and 57 percent said they had not been reached. The Trump campaign reached 35 percent of registered voters, while 63 percent said they were not contacted.
Trump’s number of voters reached is 2 percentage points higher than former Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) in his 2008 presidential campaign. Harris’s is 3 percentage points higher than former President Barack Obama’s outreach during that campaign.
Gallup conducted telephone interviews in English and Spanish Oct. 14-27 with 1,007 adults older than 18 across the country. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.
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