Almost 270,000 Mainers voted by absentee ballot as of Tuesday, with Democrats leading the way exactly a week before Election Day but Republicans seeing historic levels of early voting in the hotly contested 2nd Congressional District.
While early voting data is a poor predictor of election outcomes, Republicans will see it as a sign of momentum as they seek to lock the 2nd District down a third time for former President Donald Trump as well as replace U.S. Rep. Jared Golden with state Rep. Austin Theriault.
What’s the context: Democrats routinely lead in early voting in Maine and elsewhere. That is the case this year, with that party’s voters filing 144,000 absentee ballot requests statewide as of Tuesday to just 88,000 for Republicans.
But zoom in on the 2nd District, and you see a different picture. With nearly 44,000 requests as of Tuesday, Republicans were close to their total from the 2020 election that saw historic levels of early voting because it was early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gap between the parties in the district is smaller at this time before Election Day than it has been in any election since 2014, a successful midterm election for Republicans who reelected former Gov. Paul LePage and easily gave U.S. Sen. Susan Collins a fourth term.
The big picture: Nearly a third of the number of Mainers who voted in the 2020 presidential election have already cast their ballots. Roughly 64,000 absentee ballots were still outstanding as of Tuesday.
The partisan trend is generally in line with the national figures, which show 41 percent of early votes so far have come from Democrats and 40 percent from Republicans, according to TargetSmart data provided to NBC News.
What’s really happening: The key takeaway is that Republicans are showing much more interest in early voting this year. They have run aggressive mail campaigns to push voters toward absentee ballots that make it easier for parties to target swing voters late in campaigns.
That is notable in part because Trump has continued to falsely claim Democrats benefited from fraud to steal the 2020 election. He has criticized early voting but has also promoted those practices, telling supporters that they need to lock in votes to make the election “too big to rig.”
Research has shown that older and more experienced voters cast ballots this way more than younger and less experienced ones, and good mail campaigns can often get voters to return their ballots quicker. We don’t know if the parties are finding new voters or simply getting loyal partisans to get their ballots back.
What’s next: Early voting at municipal offices is available to Mainers through Thursday. After that, people have until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day to return their absentee ballots to their local clerks.
