Half of voters plan to cast ballots early, with a huge partisan split

Half of registered voters plan to vote early this fall, new figures from the September NBC News poll show, with Democrats continuing to run up the score among early voters and Republicans getting stronger backing from those who plan to vote in person on Election Day.

Fifty-one percent of voters say they'll vote early, either by mail or in person, with Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump 61%-35% (a 26-point margin) among those voters.

By comparison, Trump leads by 20 points, 57%-37%, with the group of voters who plan to vote on Election Day, which accounts for 45% of the electorate in the poll. It's a smaller lead among a slightly smaller share of the electorate than Harris has over those early voters.

"Either the margin has to close among [those] voting early, or Republican margins on Election Day have to be bigger than this to win," said Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who conducted the NBC News poll with Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

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The massive political difference of early and Election Day voters is the latest evidence of a dramatic and enduring shift in the Trump years.

In the final NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls of the 2012 and 2016 cycles, majorities said they planned to vote on Election Day, not early.

The surveys showed Democrats holding smaller leads with early voters both election cycles (then-President Barack Obama led by 8 points in 2012 with early voters and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led among that group by 14 points in 2016), while the Election Day vote was virtually tied in both instances.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic spurred a massive increase in early and mail voting, with the share of early voters in the late October 2020 poll jumping to 68%, with 28% saying they'd vote on Election Day.

And with that jump came a massive partisan difference — future President Joe Biden led among early voters by 26 points in the survey, while Trump led with Election Day voters by 29 points.

But while the share of voters planning to vote early has dropped between the end of 2020 and now, the major partisan split remains.

The Republican drift away from early voting comes after years of inconsistent messaging from Trump himself. On social media, in interviews and on the campaign trail, casting doubt on the security of early and mail voting with baseless claims about fraud has become a Trump hallmark, with his repeated scripted comments promoting early voting quickly undercut by contradictory criticism.