Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 presidential race based on the early voting numbers trickling in, according to a longtime political journalist.
“If the early vote numbers stay the way they are, and that’s a big if, we’ll almost certainly know before Election Day who’s going to win,” Mark Halperin, the editor-in-chief of the 2WAY video platform, said Tuesday.
Halperin, 59, noted that early voting data in at least some of the key swing states this cycle indicates that Trump, 78, is doing well enough at the moment to beat Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, when voters flock to the polls on Nov. 5.
“[M]ake no mistake, if these numbers hold up in the states where we can understand even partially what the data is like, we’ll know that Donald Trump’s going to be president on Election Day,” he said.
The former NBC News reporter stressed that early voting numbers need to be tracked “day to day” and that those figures are “more important than the polls right now.”
“It’s more important than almost anything,” Halperin argued, “because it’s giving us insight into a variety of factors that are counting for a Republican overperformance by various metrics in the early voting in the battleground states.”
Halperin spotlighted the early vote totals coming in from Nevada, specifically populous Clark County, whose county seat is Las Vegas.
“The Democrats usually have a huge lead there, [it’s] 4,500 votes,” the journalist said. “The rurals are overperforming their share of the electorate.”
Halperin also pointed to reporting Monday from The Nevada Independent showing that Republicans are leading statewide by 8,000 votes.
“[D]on’t overread the early vote, OK?” Halperin cautioned. “It can change. We don’t know exactly who’s casting these ballots, how they’re voting, etc.”
“But every analyst I’ve talked to in the last 24 hours, including people who speak publicly, say if this continues, Donald Trump can’t lose because the Democrats can’t possibly do well enough on Election Day,” he added.
The latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Trump leading Harris in all seven battleground states, which include Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.