Arizona Republicans take big early voting lead into Election Day

Republicans are going into Election Day with a big lead over Democrats when it comes to early voting totals, according to political consulting firms that are tracking the returns.

Why it matters: Though we won't know any results until after the polls close at 7pm Tuesday, we can get a snapshot of who's already submitted their ballot.

• The majority of Arizonans use early voting, and data about how many Republicans, Democrats and independents cast ballots before Election Day is available as we await final results.

The big picture: More than 2.3 million voters returned early ballots through Monday, and Republicans had cast nearly 200,000 more than Democrats, according to data from Uplift Campaigns, a Democratic firm tracking results.

• The remainder are independents and third-party voters.
• In Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state's population, Republicans have outpaced Democrats on early ballots by about 118,000.

Zoom in: Republicans make up nearly 41% of early ballot returns compared with Democrats' 32%. That's a wider margin than in 2016, when the GOP led by more than 6 percentage points the day before the election. In 2020, Democrats had a similar advantage, per Uplift.

• After several years of skepticism toward early voting, Arizona Republicans have made a push to persuade GOP voters to cast their ballots early, and it appears to be working.
• Total early ballot returns still lag slightly behind where they were the day before the 2020 election.

State of play: Maricopa County has received about 1.5 million ballot packages, more than 1.1 million of which have been verified and processed, Recorder Stephen Richer told reporters at a press conference Monday.

• County election officials had received about 1.5 million ballot packages as of Monday afternoon, and they expected to get another 600,000 through by the end of the day.
• Each ballot package is two pages.

Between the lines: Democrats will need a lot of crossover votes to win statewide, Sam Almy of Uplift Campaigns told Axios

• He expected Republicans to vote heavily on Election Day and for Democrats to drop off large numbers of early ballots at the polls, similar to 2018, when those ballots propelled Democrats into the lead in several statewide races.
• But Republican consultant George Khalaf, whose firm Data Orbital is also tracking early ballot returns, said that through Friday, Republicans had fared better than Democrats for lower-efficacy voters turning in early ballots.
• That would indicate that Republicans still have a large number of reliable voters who have yet to cast ballots.

Zoom out: Nationally, more than 78 million people had cast early ballots, CNN reported Monday afternoon.

• Republicans have increased their overall early vote share over 2020, when then-President Trump urged people not to vote by mail.

The intrigue: We won't know until the ballots are counted who those voters are, and both parties are trying to decipher returns to find out what they'll mean for election calls.