We Have Reached 40% of Total Turnout; Biden Leads by 20 Million Votes (if the polls are right) [View all]

[berni_mccoy]

As of right now, 95 million people have voted. (see: https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html)

This is 69.2% of the 2016 turnout and represents a 40% turnout of the Voting Eligible Population (which is 239,247,182) (see: http://www.electproject.org/2020g)

If the national polling data from https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/ is correct, then that means Biden has about a 20 million vote lead in Early Voting (this is extrapolated using the subset of early voting data that has Party ID correlated with the average of the cross tabs on Party ID).

This is most likely an insurmountable lead in the popular vote. Some percentage of Democrats will vote tomorrow. 40 million Trump voters will need to vote tomorrow with fewer than 20 million Biden voters in order for Trump to overtake Biden in the popular vote. That would give Trump 77 million votes, 15 million more than he got in 2016, which is extremely unlikely.

If the distribution goes as projected and turnout is 55%, the same as 2016, Biden will win the popular vote with 10 million votes
At 65% turnout, Biden wins the popular vote with 12.4 million votes.

If you look at Nate Silvers projections for Electoral College win based on popular vote gap, a 10 million vote win like this would translate into a 8-9 point popular vote win, which gives Biden > 99% chance of winning the EC (see: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-that-trump-can-still-win/ )

My final prediction for this election based on the polls plus the early voting data (something we have not had this scale before): Biden 54% to Trump 46% with Biden taking at least 320 Electoral Votes.