In North Carolina as of 4:00 am on 10/09/2020 there were 443,190 absentee ballots cast. Republicans are 30.16% of the registered voters, yet only accounted for 17.47% of those ballots. Democrats at 35.72% of the registered voters accounted for 51.61% of the returned ballots. Unaffiliated voters are 33.39% of the registered voters and account for 30,58% of the returned ballots.
So Democrats are returning ballots at a rate about 1.45 times their prevalence would indicate, and Republicans are returning ballots at rate about 0.6 times their prevalence. Unaffiliated voters are pretty close to on target.
Just as a comparison, on this date in 2016 there had only been 34.991 votes cast, so more than 12.5 times the number of absentee votes have been cast as of this morning.
Edited to add: 6.12 percent of the registered voters in North Carolina have already voted.
I’m not wanting to count my chickens, and I’m working on organizing GOTV efforts among public-school supporters in my community. But I’m finding some encouraging snippets in 538’s predictions. Right now, there are two races where Trump and Biden poll equally: Trump’s chances of winning the overall election are the same as Biden’s chances of winning Missisfuckingsippi.
You know Trump is worried when he picks a fight against “someone that got it wrong before” (in reality 538 got a lot of flack from the left and Democrats in 2016 when 538 was one of the few giving better chances of victory to Trump than other pollsters, and the popular vote matched what they expected.)
I remember on the morning of the 2016 election, I was shaking my head and tut-tutting at Nate Silver. I figured Clinton would win in a landslide and Silver would say, “Hey, he did have a chance! Trust me!”
Instead, I think we all had to admit he had it right.
Was anyone except Nate Silver admitting Trump had more than even a 20% chance in 2016?
Michael Moore predicted a Trump win. He knew the enthusiasm on the ground in the Northeast. The last I heard this year was about a month ago, he said it could happen again but thought Biden would win if the Democratic voters turned out
I did mean pollsters. I think Michael Moore was just guessing based on some observations. I heard that Harlan Ellison also said, “Trump is going to win this thing,” or something like that.
Clinton was very likely to win, but I am thinking Biden is even more likely.
Clinton was never as “far ahead” as BIden is now. Also, Clinton was trending down at this point and Biden is trending up. Of course nothing is certain.
Here’s an interesting set of charts from electoral-vote.com, showing the support for the two candidates in teh elections going back to 2004. They only use polls showing at least 5% gap, to avoid margins of error. Biden has had the most consistent lead in the polls of any candidate in those four previous elections.
Incidentally, the Canadian version of Fivethirtyeight, 338 (Canada has 338 electoral ridings, sort of the equivalent number to 538 EVs) has its own predictions. I gotta tell you - in terms of graphic design, this page is WAY better. Like, 1854398390 times better.
Much worse than that. Actual vote-changing malfeasance from both foreign and domestic sources. Mail in ballots that will be “lost.” Poll places that will be mysteriously closed by emergency orders on election day. Every possible legal challenge or dirty trick in the book. Propaganda campaigns about the state of the election. Trump declaring victory before the absentee/mail in ballots are counted and claiming that any attempt to change his victory are clear evidence of voter fraud.
Yes, there will be armed men at polling places in democratic districts, but that’s only a small fraction of the ugliness we’re going to see. Georgia in 2012-2018 were test runs and they got away with it. Now we have a president who has never faced consequences in his life, a complicit GOP, and the de-funded and de-tasked election security force, and an extremely capable foreign nation with our president under their control and therefore no brakes on what they’re going to do. It’s going to be ugly. It’s going to be uglier than a banana republic election. I wish the UN would send election observers here.