By NICHOLAS RICCARDI Associated Press

With former President Donald Trump’s encouragement, Republicans are voting early again, flocking to the polls for in-person voting ahead of Election Day and helping break records for ballots cast before November in key states like Georgia and North Carolina.

The GOP hopes this will fix a mechanical problem that some in the party blame for costing it the 2020 presidential and key 2022 elections. Campaigns usually want their voters to cast ballots ahead of Election Day so they can focus their resources on getting more marginal supporters to the polls at the last minute.

Republicans excelled at that before Trump turned against mail voting in 2020, spinning wild conspiracies about the centuries-old process and convincing his supporters to wait until Election Day to cast their ballots. But the party is again pushing its voters to cast their ballots early, and the former president is largely encouraging the change, with a conspiratorial pitch.

“I need you to vote and I need you to go to the polls before Election Day because they will try on Election Day to keep you home,” Trump told voters in North Carolina on Monday.

Republicans seem to be responding. In North Carolina, where in 2022 Democrats had an edge of more than 30 percentage points of the vote at this point in 2022, they are only ahead by 1 percentage point this year. In Nevada, where Democrats for decades relied on a robust early vote to counter the GOP on Election Day, about 1,000 more Republicans have actually cast early ballots this year than Democrats.

It’s unclear what this means for the election, however. The early vote data only reveals whether voters are registered with a party, not who they are voting for. The early electorate can change from day to day as more and more people vote early. And what seem like demographic trends in early vote can suddenly disappear once Election Day votes are factored in.

It is still very early in the voting process — the last of the seven swing states, Wisconsin, kicked off its early voting Tuesday morning. Parties can run up leads in the early vote and then see them vanish on Election Day because all their supporters have already cast ballots and the other side has not.

“The Democrats are still, as far as I can tell, banking more early votes. It’s just less of a disadvantage for Republicans,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who carefully tracks the early vote. But, McDonald cautioned, “we don’t know if this is a shifting of furniture yet or an added strength for Republicans.”

One thing is clear — the return to bipartisan early voting has helped bust records. North Carolina and Georgia both reported record turnout on the first day of in-person early voting, and it’s spilled over into states that aren’t competitive at the presidential level, like South Carolina, which reported its own record when it opened early voting Monday.

Republicans seem to still have an aversion to mail balloting. They’ve improved their share of the mail vote in several states but still lag behind Democrats, particularly in Pennsylvania, where there is no in-person early option and Republicans have sent in more than 300,000 fewer mail ballots than Democrats. But the GOP is making up ground by voting early in-person in most competitive states.

Still, years of sowing conspiracies about early and mail voting have taken a toll on the conservative electorate. At Elon Musk’s first solo event in support of Trump last week, he encouraged the crowd to vote early, an entreaty that some in the audience responded to by shouting back, “Why?”