With early and mail voting hitting new records and total 2024 turnout expected to either meet or surpass the 2020 election, Democrats are beginning to fret that their get-out-the-vote effort isn’t hitting the marks it needs to hit with just six days to go. In Pennsylvania alone, Republicans are starting to catch up to Democrats’ return averages for mail ballots. 

As of Wednesday, Democrats had returned more than 880,000 mail ballots in Pennsylvania, while Republicans returned only about 500,000. In terms of raw vote totals, while Vice President Harris’s party may have an advantage in total ballots returned, their margin of victory has decreased sharply. Four years ago, Democrats won mail votes by more than 40 percent; now they are winning by just 26 percent. 

That return rate may also seem like a large deficit for the GOP, though it is the rate of return for requested ballots that tells a deeper story about partisan motivation. Democrats have returned about 73 percent of the mail ballots that were sent out to their voters, while Republicans returned 70 percent. 

Far fewer Pennsylvanias will vote by mail this year, fueling Democratic hopes that sagging early vote numbers can be made up for on election day. The deadline for requesting mail ballots from Pennsylvania election officials was Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning, the state had posted their final request numbers. Just under 2.2 million ballots had been requested by the deadline, which is down significantly from 2020 when 2.8 million Pennsylvanians requested mail ballots.  

Some conservatives online — including X’s owner and Trump backer Elon Musk — have tried to make the argument that early vote numbers show signs of a Republican landslide next week. “Republican early votes now exceed Democrat votes in New Jersey, normally a Democrat-leaning state!” Mr. Musk wrote on Wednesday morning, referring to early in-person voting numbers that have so far come out of New Jersey. 

What he failed to include were the total vote-by-mail numbers that have so far come in. Including both early in-person and mail voting, Democrats have cast more than 522,000 votes in New Jersey compared to around 275,000 votes from Republicans, a nearly two-to-one advantage.

Republicans like Mr. Musk have been trying to read the tea leaves to make the case that because the GOP is drastically over performing in pre-election day voting methods, they are destined for victory, though experts have warned that methods of voting are going to depolarize sharply compared to 2020, when Democrats overwhelmingly voted by mail and Republicans overwhelmingly voted on election day. 

While the mail voting and early-in person voting have shifted sharply to the right, expect election day voting to shift sharply to the left. According to the Pew Research Center, just 17 percent of registered Democrats cast their ballots in-person on election day in 2020. In the midterm elections just two years later, they doubled that in-person election day rate to 34 percent. 

One of the GOP’s greatest success stories for now is their early and mail vote returns in Nevada, where they have a 40,000 vote edge over Democrats statewide mostly because Ms. Harris’s party has not hit their turnout numbers at Clark County, home to Las Vegas. 

The editor of the Nevada Independent, Jon Ralston, warned that Republicans saw a similarly rosy picture in 2022 with respect to mail and early vote only to see that year’s Senate race slip away from them, which he says could happen again in the presidential race this year. 

“When the 2-week in-person early vote ended, 36% of mail ballots were still to come. Then on Election Day, in Clark County, 62K mail ballots were dropped off. Does the mail cometh after Friday again?” Mr. Ralston warned.