One week from Election Day, preelection voters look different than they did 4 years ago

With one week until Election Day, more than 43 million ballots have been cast across 47 states and the District of Columbia.

With one week until Election Day, more than 43 million ballots have been cast across 47 states and the District of Columbia. That’s according to data gathered by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit advocacy groups, including insights into who is voting before November. So far, preelection voting across the country is down significantly from this point four years ago, when a record number of voters turned out before Election Day amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The preelection total is more than a quarter of the roughly 158 million votes cast for president in 2020. Across the states where Catalist has comparable data, early voters so far are older, slightly more likely to be White and more likely to be Republican than they were at this point four years ago. These trends also generally hold, where data is available, in the seven states that are likely to decide the election. Early voting trends cannot predict the outcome of an election, but they can provide clues about who is voting – at least so far. So far, across 39 states where Catalist has data for both years, voters ages 65 and older make up 46% of all returned ballots, up 10 percentage points from this point in 2020. Voters ages 30-39 have cast 9% of early ballots, down from 12% in 2020. About 74% of voters in those states are White, up slightly from 73% at this point four years ago, while Black, Latino and Asian voters make up slightly smaller shares of the early voting electorate.