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the Map
Forecast8 days out
Early vote · by county · not a forecast input

Where the early ballots are coming from

How the early ballots so far split between the counties Harris won in 2024 and the ones Trump won, beside the same counties’ share of a past vote. One circle per county, in the 13 states whose files count ballots by county and can be set against a past vote.

A county's ballots are not its votes: a blue county's early voters include Republicans and the reverse. Registration is not a vote. This view counts ballots cast so far; it forecasts neither the result nor how many will vote.

Not shown, and why

  • 33 more states are counted on the early-vote page without a count by county: Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Sources and methods

Across: each county’s 2024 presidential margin, Harris minus Trump as a share of the votes for the two of them: the county returns every county map on this site draws, checked state by state against the Federal Election Commission’s official 2024 results.

Up: where a state keeps each county’s count day by day in 2022 as well as this year (Pennsylvania), each county’s ballots against its own on the same day of voting in 2022, in the counties whose returns were under way in both years. Elsewhere no count by county survives for the same day, so each county’s ballots so far are set against all its votes for president in 2024, the same county returns as across. A midterm’s early vote is a smaller share of a presidential turnout in every county alike, so the level of the figures is not the point; what the chart compares is counties within one state, and a state is never set against another. The share says how far along a county’s early vote is against its last counted vote, not how many will vote.

Size: each county’s ballots so far, from the state’s own file, through the last day that file counts county by county (where a newer statewide count is civicAPI’s, the counties stay at the state’s own day).

The two big figures split the ballots so far between the counties each candidate won in 2024, so they add up to 100; under each is the same counties’ share of the past vote (the 2024 vote, or the same day of 2022). The sentence above them compares the two: within a point it says the split is about the same, within three points “a little more”, and past that “more”. The pace line adds up the counties on each side the other way: all the ballots in the counties Harris won against all their baseline, and the same for Trump’s. These describe places, not voters. A county’s ballots are cast by voters of every party, early voters differ from Election Day voters, and nothing here enters the forecast.