It's really to give a sense of calm to Democrats. It's looking like 2024 mail-in ballots are going to be about 25% of 2020 turnout. The current theory is that turnout is going to be lower this year but not 2016 low. If Democrats have 450k net ballot lead (net vote lead will be higher) going into Election Day with 28% of ballots already cast, it will calm those who pay attention.

As far as GOP pushing mail-in voting, that's only been happening for the past three weeks. Democrats started with an almost 480k request lead & it has been as high as 528.3k this week. This week was the GOP's best week in requests ever & still only "won" the week by 5,145 requests. They also closed the returned gap this week...from 7.99% to 7.93%.