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What Republicans Need to Do on Election Day
A deep dive now that we have a good sense of mail voting
Mark Harris
November 01, 2024
With early voting requests 99.5% in and with the patterns on returns pretty clear we can project with a decent sense where things will land. For this exercise I am assuming 90% return rates for GOP and Dems. I actually think possible Republicans for the first time ever return at a higher rate then Democrats but to be determined.
Requests | Returns (current) | Returns (projected) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Republicans | 713,847 | 553,158 (77.5%) | 642,462 |
Democrats | 1,199,558 | 947,214 (79.0%) | 1,079,602 |
Independents | 281,709 | 188,179 (66.8%) | 211,281 |
NET | D+485,711 | D+394,056 | D+437,140 |
Just to put in perspective not only is this group much more Republican by % than 2020 and 2022 but even in raw numbers it’s a significant change. The Democrats had a 594,000 margin in mail ballots in 2022 so this is 157,000 ballots better than 2022 even though mail ballots in total grew by 58%.
So what do Republicans need to do to ensure they have more voters voting than Democrats in total? They need 437,141 more Republicans than Democrats to vote on Election Day. (Again this is not about who they are voting for, which is a slightly different analysis — mail voting independents are very left leaning so Harris margin in the mail will be larger than just the partisan gap).
Scenarios | E Day Turnout | GOP % Needed |
|---|---|---|
Low - 6.3m total | 4,400,000 | R+9.9 |
Medium - 6.5m total | 4,600,000 | R+9.5 |
High - 6.8m total | 4,900,000 | R+8.9 |
All of this is very doable but Republicans need to get their low turnout voters. Democrats are going to be sitting with 500,000 or so people who were mail voters in 2020 that haven’t voted that they can pour into the electorate.
I’m optimistic for Republicans but all signs point to a photo finish.