With just five days until Election Day, more than 68 million Americans have already cast their ballots, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. But what this data means about the outcome of next week’s election depends largely on who you ask.

The campaigns of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are entering election week optimistic about their chances.

“We feel really good about what we saw,” a senior Harris campaign official said Thursday. “We have focused our entire organization on doing everything possible to ensure our votes turn out well.”

“President Trump continues to lead in poll after poll, Republicans have made major voter registration gains, and we’re doing much better in our share of early voting in all battleground states than we were two or four years ago,” said Karoline, Trump’s campaign national press secretary. ” he said. Leavitt said in a statement to Scripps News. “Voters know Kamala Harris ruined our country, but President Trump will fix it and that’s why he’s well positioned for victory on November 5.”

But behind that trend, experts on both sides of the aisle say the race is extremely close but Harris enters election day in a strong position.

This may seem inconsistent with initial inferences from early voting data; In many battleground states, Republicans appear to be voting earlier than Democrats, with Republicans voting early at a significantly higher rate than in 2020.

For example, as of Friday evening, more than 290,000 registered Republicans have voted so far in Nevada, while only 253,000 registered Democrats have voted, according to market research firm TargetSmart. Meanwhile, at this point in 2020, about 13,000 more registered Democrats had voted than Republicans.

Similar trends are seen in early voting data in North Carolina and Georgia; But Georgia doesn’t require voters to share their party affiliation when registering, so guessing their ideology requires more guesswork.

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Still, the data may not be as bad for Democrats as it seems. TargetSmart analysis found that a significant portion of Republicans who vote early will likely have voted on election day in 2020, meaning Republicans may not be able to turn out enough new voters to shift their votes earlier.

“About 94% of all Republicans who have voted in Pennsylvania so far have voted in 2020,” said Tom Bonier, a senior consultant at TargetSmart and a longtime Democratic strategist. Bonier added that Republicans were not “manufacturing new votes” but rather “moving people who were already voting on Election Day and getting them out early.”

According to senior campaign advisers, this data reflects what the Harris campaign is seeing from the inside. Earlier on Election Day in Nevada, Republican early voters cast ballots at nearly three times the rate of Democratic early voters, officials told Scripps News, citing “the modeling is based on voter file data and high-quality tracking surveys.” In Georgia, twice as many Republicans who had already voted waited until election day last time.

“They’re just changing the way they vote,” a senior Harris campaign official said. “Instead of bringing in new voters, they are shifting from Election Day voters to early voting.”

Even some Republicans have acknowledged that comparing 2024 voting trends to the 2020 presidential race may not be all that productive, given that the last election was held during a historic pandemic and voter preferences may have changed since then.

The last presidential election was during Covid, and we were in the middle of a pretty big shift in how people voted and when they voted,” a Republican strategist told Scripps News. “Based on the volume of early voting this time around, I don’t think it tells a definitive story that a lot of people are trying to predict.”

Overall, the total number of early voters who have cast ballots so far is down from 2020 figures; This is to be expected, given the easing of pandemic restrictions. “Essentially, every group is experiencing a decline in early voting compared to four years ago,” Bonier said. “It’s just a question of which groups have experienced greater declines.”

Of course, there are some positive trends in Trump’s campaign. In Arizona, for example, enrollment and participation are particularly strong among white men; This group is expected to support Trump by a large margin.

And Trump’s campaign has been quick to highlight the slight lead the former president has maintained in recent swing state polls; Tony Fabrizo, the campaign’s pollster, noted in a memo that public polling averages put Trump in a significantly better position today than he has in four years. Years ago.

There are other positive signs for Harris, though. Battleground voters who made up their minds last week favored Harris “by a double-digit margin,” a senior campaign adviser said Friday. Similarly, there is evidence that female voters (another group expected to support Harris more than Trump) are more likely than men to turn out in key battleground states.

All in all, experts agree that the race has remained historically close.

“I’ve never seen a race that’s been going on for this long, with this much going on, where it’s really a head-to-head race, at least according to the polls,” the Republican strategist said.

As with all elections, who wins will ultimately depend on which voters turn out to vote on election day and how campaigns can mobilize their supporters. The Harris campaign has invested heavily in this so-called ground game operation, while Trump’s team has largely outsourced the effort to Elon Musk and other outside groups.

“Nobody has any idea how this is going to happen,” the Republican strategist said. “Amazingly it could go or it couldn’t go. “We don’t know that, and we won’t know until it’s over.”

Scripps News reporter Haley Bull contributed to this report.