4 charts show how early voting went in the US

By Curt Merrill, Matt Stiles, Ethan Cohen and John Murphy-Teixidor, CNN

As of November 4, the day before Election Day, more than 78 million Americans had already cast their ballots in the 2024 election, either by mail or through early in-person voting. Here’s what we know about those who got a head start on shaping the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

CNN monitored who cast pre-election ballots in the 36 states that offered early voting, as well as how early voting numbers compared with four years ago, when pre-election voting reached historic levels during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This page drew on data from Catalist, election officials and Edison Research. It will no longer be updated now that early voting has closed.

Democrats held a wide advantage over Republicans in early voting four years ago, but the gap was narrower this time as top Republican officials had urged supporters to embrace voting before Election Day.

Voters register by party in four of the seven presidential battlegrounds, and in each of those four, Democrats had cast a smaller share of pre-election ballots this year than at this point in 2020. Registration data by party is not available for the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The 2020 election featured historic levels of pre-election voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some voters were wary to vote in-person with guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recommending social distancing. Four years later, with the country out of the pandemic, more voters could be heading back to the ballot box on Election Day. Here’s how early voting tracked in the states where it was offered:

Another measure evident in the data is that older voters made up a larger share of people casting ballots in battleground states, compared with this point in 2020.

Here’s what the early voting data shows about the electorate in some battleground states, by racial and ethnic groups:

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Molly English contributed to this report.