After heavy skepticism in 2020, Republicans have embraced early mail-in voting, making early projections more difficult. Trump and Harris have both found reasons to be hopeful in the early data from mail-in voting.

“President Trump’s position nationally and in every single Battleground State is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was 4 years ago,” chief Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio wrote in a Thursday memo obtained by Politico. “While the analysis of early and absentee vote returns in each state are promising, we know that the bulk of President Trump voters will vote on Election Day. So, our continued efforts to turnout our voters are crucial.”

The memo featured the latest RealClearPolitics average, showing Trump with leads in five out of the seven battleground states — enough to pull off a victory.

Harris’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, told CNN that early voting totals line up with their calculations of what they need for victory.

“Our sense is that … the people who’ve made up their mind in the last week, we’re doing quite well with,” he said. “And we like the people who’ve yet to make a decision in terms of who they look like from a data perspective and what they self-report in terms of who they’re likely to vote for. In the early vote so far, we are on pace in all seven states to reach the number we think we need, combined with Election Day turnout.”

Elsewhere, analysts on both sides found even more promising news. Democrats caught onto the news that Trump was lagging with seniors, a key Republican demographic, in early voting in Pennsylvania. In Nevada, Republicans took a clear lead over Democrats.

Election analyst Nate Silver, speaking on Saturday, took both sides’ ability to see victory in the early voting patterns as a sign of the futility of drawing any significant conclusions.

“That the most hackish partisans on both sides invariably think the early voting numbers are great for them tells you all you need to know about the utility of looking at early voting numbers,” Silver said.

According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, as of Friday morning, roughly 66 million people in the United States had already cast their votes.