Over 40 million people have already cast their ballot for the November election, and that turnout appears to be favoring Democrats.
Forty-one point one million people have voted early, representing just under 40% of the total number of votes in 2016.
Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida, has been collecting these figures into a database called the U.S. Elections Project, which is updated frequently.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Texas, Vermont, and New Jersey reached more than 50% of their total vote count from 2016.
The early ballots collected so far appear to be mostly from registered Democrats. However, only 19 states release data on the party affiliation of early voters.
Of the voters in those states, over 19 million people have voted. Fifty-two percent of those voters are registered Democrats. Just over 26% are registered Republicans. Over 21% did not have a party affiliation.
While there is a nearly even split on the list of 19 between states that went red in 2016 and those that went blue, the blue states had larger populations. Of the 10 states on the list that went Republican in 2016, only South Dakota had a higher percentage of Republicans voting early than Democrats.
Even in Kentucky, which President Trump secured by 8 percentage points in 2016, Democrats have the early lead. Of the ballots cast in the state so far, 62.1% have come from Democrats, and only 32.5% have come from Republicans.
For now, experts are uncertain of the implications of this advantage. The lead could be indicative of a win for former Vice President Joe Biden. However, those gaps in these early figures could be made up for by a surge of Republican votes on Election Day.
"I strongly caution that Democrats’ unprecedented high levels of early voting should not be taken as an indicator of the final election results," McDonald wrote on the "Frequently Asked Questions" page of the U.S. Elections Project.
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN wrote on Monday, "The obvious asterisk to place here is that President Donald Trump has waged rhetorical war on mail-in voting this year. Polls suggest Republicans are less likely than Democrats to vote by mail, so the Democratic advantage in swing state ballot requests is interesting, but not predictive of anything."
