How Early Voting Quietly Rewrote the Campaign Playbook

Early voting and mail ballots now account for a majority of votes cast in a growing number of states, a structural shift that has changed how campaigns spend their money and how results get reported on election night.

Early and mail voting, expanded significantly during the pandemic, has remained popular well beyond the public health circumstances that originally drove its growth, with a majority of ballots in a growing number of states now cast before Election Day itself rather than at a polling place on the day of the election.

Campaigns have adjusted their entire strategy and spending timeline to account for the shift, front-loading advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts weeks earlier than the traditional Election Day-focused playbook once required, since a meaningful share of the electorate has effectively already voted by the time a late-breaking news story or debate moment might otherwise sway them.

Counting takes longer, and that’s by design

The shift has also changed how quickly results can be reported, since mail ballots typically require more time-intensive verification steps than in-person votes, leading to longer vote-counting windows in states with high mail voting rates — a delay that election officials describe as evidence of careful verification, but which has also become a recurring source of public confusion and, at times, unfounded suspicion in close races.

“A longer count isn’t a red flag. It’s what careful verification of a huge volume of mail ballots actually looks like.”

With little indication that voters who’ve grown accustomed to early and mail voting want to return to an Election Day-only model, campaigns and election administrators alike appear to be settling into a permanently longer campaign and counting calendar built around the new voting patterns.