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.

With two weeks until Election Day, nearly 19 million people have already cast their ballots, the clearest sign yet that voting habits were forever changed by the coronavirus pandemic and that early voting has become a permanent feature of the American democratic process.

The GOP hopes this will fix a 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.

“I am telling everyone to vote early,” Trump said on a radio show last week hosted by conservative Dan Bongino, who has widely spread false information about early voting and the 2020 election.

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 ahead by only 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 6,000 more Republicans have actually cast early ballots this year than Democrats.

Many states have set records for the first day of early voting.

On Thursday, more than 353,000 ballots were cast in North Carolina, a record for the swing state still reeling from Hurricane Helene. On Friday, nearly 177,000 voters cast a ballot in Louisiana, a record.

The shift has been starkest in Georgia, where voters have set a daily record for in-person early voting nearly every day since polls opened Oct. 15. More than 1.5 million voters have already cast an early ballot in the battleground state.

Another state to watch is Nevada, which mailed ballots to every voter in both 2020 and 2024.

As of Monday, about 53,000 Democrats had returned mail ballots compared with about 37,000 Republicans. In 2020, roughly 106,000 Democrats and 47,000 Republicans had returned a mail ballot by this point.

But it’s unclear what this means for the election.

It is still 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 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 lag Democrats in casting mail-in ballots by more than 300,000. 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?”

The New York Times contributed.