Over 1M Pennsylvania voters have already cast a ballot. Are they mostly blue or red?

LEVITTOWN, Pennsylvania - With Election Day just two weeks away on Nov. 5, more than 11.5% of Pennsylvania’s more than 9 million registered voters have returned a mail ballot so far in the all-important 2024 battleground.

Approximately 1 million of the 1.78 million voters who requested a mail-in or absentee ballots for the presidential election featuring Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump have returned them to their respective county’s board of election, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of State last updated Tuesday morning.

The last day to apply for a mail ballot in Pennsylvania is Tuesday, Oct. 29. Ballots must be returned to a voter’s board of election office by 8 p.m. Nov. 5.

Democrats lead Republicans in mail voting in Pa.

Democratic voters lead in both mail ballot requests and ballots returned as of Friday, with that party’s voters making up almost 58% of applications and 62% of returned ballots, according to the state’s data.

Democrats have historically favored voting by mail in Pennsylvania with no-excuse mail ballots since 2020, the first election after Act 77 of 2019 allowing the ballot option was signed into law.

Despite continued attempts from Republican groups to warm their party’s voters to mail ballots after years of framing mail voting as ripe for fraud, GOP voters in Pennsylvania still seem to be shirking the post office for the ballot box this year.

Approximately 30% of mail ballot requests in the race between Harris and Trump were made by Republicans. GOP voters also make up about 29% of returned ballots.

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Republicans have requested about half as many mail ballot applications as Democrats, and the 561,634 Republicans who have requested a ballot account for only about 15% of the party’s 3.67 million voters.

For contrast, about 27% of 3.9 million Democrats and 16% of 1.4 million third party and unaffiliated voters have applied to vote by mail in November.

A recent exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of 1,000 likely voters across the county currently has the race between Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Trump, the Republican candidate, as a coin-toss split of 45-44% in Harris’ favor.

Among those who have already cast their ballot in states with some form of early voting, Harris leads 52% to 35%.

For voters who are waiting to cast their ballot on Election Day, Trump leads 52% to 39%.

Pennsylvania allows what is officially known as on-demand mail ballot voting, where a registered voter requests, fills out and returns a mail ballot in a single visit to their county’s election office.

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Philadelphia area leading in returned ballots

As of Tuesday, the four collar counties of Philadelphia returned 489,661 ballots, which was approximately 26% of all ballots returned in the commonwealth.

Montgomery and Bucks counties have 99,666 ballots and 71,785 ballots returned, respectively, with the breakdown by party trending closely with the state.

The suburbs of Pennsylvania have become key battlegrounds within Pennsylvania, the largest swing state in the country that could decide who will be the next president.

Harris and Trump both focused in on Bucks over the last week, a county where Republican voters outnumber Democrats by a margin of almost 4,000 voters out of 488,977 registered, based on state data updated Monday.

In Oaks, located in Montgomery County, Trump stopped taking questions at a town hall event after a pair of medical emergencies in the crowd, instead dancing and playing music for 39 minutes as supporters trickled out, USA Today reported.

Harris held an event in Washington Crossing Historic Park in Bucks last Wednesday urging "country over party," appearing with more than 100 Republicans.

Trump stopped at McDonald's in Feasterville on Sunday afternoon, serving a vetted line of customers and insisting that Harris never worked at the fast food chain as she has claimed.

While Trump hasn’t managed to win Bucks County in either of the last two presidential elections — Clinton took the county 48.7 to 47.6% and Biden won with a 4-point lead at 51% of the vote — he maintains a strong support base in the area.

Data Hub Reporter Chris Ullery contributed to this report. Reach him at [email protected].

(This story was updated to add new information.)

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: In Pennsylvania, Democrat have early voting lead