Democrats appear to be outpacing their 2012 early vote performance in several critical swing states, giving Hillary Clinton a head start on Donald Trump in some of the most important presidential battlegrounds.

In two must-win states for Trump, North Carolina and Florida, Republicans are clinging to narrow leads in the total number of mail-in ballots requested. Yet in both states, Clinton is ahead of President Barack Obama’s pace four years earlier — and the GOP trails Mitt Romney’s clip.


Any diminishment of the GOP’s mail-in ballot lead is a matter of concern for Republicans because Democrats typically dominate early in-person voting in both states, which will begin over the next 10 days.

“Democrats have narrowed already the advantage that the Republicans had in 2012,” said Michael McDonald, whose United States Election Project offers detailed analysis of early and absentee voting patterns.

Trump has little chance of capturing the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the Electoral College without winning North Carolina and Florida. Both states were decided by less than 100,000 votes in 2012.

The early vote has emerged as a fiercely fought test of the presidential campaigns’ energy and organization — roughly a third of the vote was cast before Election Day in 2012.

This year, the Clinton campaign expects as many as 40 percent of battleground state votes to be cast before Nov. 8. The campaign’s allies point to optimistic scenarios in which they build insurmountable leads well before Election Day in a handful of swing states — in places as varied as Nevada, Colorado and Virginia.

But McDonald said there are undercurrents that should cause concern for the Democratic nominee. The party’s early-vote performance in Midwestern states like Iowa and Ohio appears to be well behind its 2012 pace. And it could be a signal that, while Democrats may be gaining strength up and down the East Coast, they could be losing steam in states Obama won twice, like Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin.

“We are in bizarro world,” said McDonald. “We’ve got non-uniform movement here in the country. Dare I say a realignment?”

If Democrats are truly losing their edge in the Midwest, that could portend problems in Wisconsin, McDonald said, because the party’s weakest performance has come in eastern Iowa, which borders Wisconsin’s southwest region.

Trump allies in Iowa point to daily absentee ballot request figures that show GOP requests exceeding Democratic requests nearly every day in October so far. And GOP figures steadily increased over the past week, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the sexual assault controversies that have dogged Trump since the publication of an "Access Hollywood" tape on Oct. 7. Early-vote experts and Republican operatives in Iowa suggested that allegations of assault served to energize Republicans who are rallying around Trump because they believe he has been unfairly attacked. Meanwhile, Democrats in Iowa have slipped sharply behind their 2012 pace in requested absentee ballots.

At the end of September, Democrats held a 44,000 absentee-ballot-request lead over Republicans. As of Friday, after two weeks of GOP gains, that margin sat at 26,000.

In 2004, said one GOP operative in Iowa, “we went into Election Day 100,000 votes down. The danger zone [for Democrats] is probably 50 or 60,000 going into Election Day.”

Similarly, in Ohio, where statewide data are more limited but county-level data have been released, Democratic ballot requests are sharply behind their 2012 pace in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County — and the gap appears to be worsening.

View Key polls of the day Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 12 points, Clinton gets a large majority of the Latino vote and a huge portion of Republicans believe that the election could be 'stolen' from Donald Trump.

McDonald noted that Democrats last week were about 16 percent behind their 2012 ballot request rate in Cuyahoga, the most populous county in the state. By Friday, they had slipped to 17.5 percent behind.

“The ballot requests are just anemic,” he said.

The early-voting performance in Iowa and Ohio tracks with polls showing Trump better positioned in those two states than in North Carolina and Florida. Likewise, in the two Southern states, where Clinton is ahead, according to POLITICO Battleground States polling averages , Democrats report sharp increases in absentee ballot requests from Hispanic, African-American and female voters.

The problem for Trump is that Ohio (18) and Iowa (6) have just 24 electoral votes between them, while North Carolina (15) and Florida (29) together offer 44.

So far, women are requesting ballots at a far faster rate than men in both North Carolina and Florida. That works to Clinton’s advantage — according to the most recent Fox News poll , Clinton had a 19-point advantage over Trump with female voters.

And Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters in a press call Thursday that 180,000 Hispanic Floridians who didn’t vote in 2014 had requested mail-in ballots. (Clinton leads Trump by 24 points among likely Hispanic voters in Florida, according to a recent poll conducted for the conservative-leaning Associated Industries of Florida business group.)

In North Carolina, 57 percent of early absentee voters have been women in a state where the electorate has traditionally been about 53 percent women, according to Michael Bitzer, a Catawba College political scientist who studies the state’s early voting patterns.

Bitzer said Trump’s recent controversies surrounding his conduct toward women would generally help spike early voting activity for Democrats, but the effects are unclear because Hurricane Matthew may have altered early voting patterns in the southeast corner of the state. (The hurricane also hugged the east coast of Florida last week, scrambling voting patterns in some Republican-leaning areas.) But Bitzer added that so many voters’ perceptions have hardened on Trump and Clinton that very little is likely to alter the trajectory of the race.

One wild card, the U.S. Election Project’s McDonald noted, is Trump’s threat to launch a scorched-earth campaign against Clinton over the next three weeks. Though Trump may need to do that to claw his way back after falling behind in recent national polls, that strategy risks activating dormant Democrats in the Midwest, where polls show him tied or clinging to narrow leads.

“Trump’s better off letting sleeping dogs lie. If you just let them continue what they’re doing, he’s in good shape [in Iowa and Ohio],” he said. “By trying to tear down Clinton in the other states, he could inadvertently activate these people. If partisans perceive an attack on their candidate is unfair, that could cause them to rally. If Trump is going to kick the dog, it may end up waking up and biting him.”