Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, Chad! The fact that things are running so smoothly today has to be due at least in part to the massive early voting we’ve seen — turns out, when fewer people vote on Election Day, lines are shorter! I do have a feeling that the convenience of being able to vote early — whether it’s in-person or by mail — may outweigh the thrill of voting in person on Election Day for many people going forward.

And for some people, it could make voting possible in a way that it literally wasn’t before — a not-insignificant share of respondents in our recent survey with Ipsos said they couldn’t vote in a recent election because they couldn’t get off work, for example. But I am curious to hear from folks like Maya, who has been tracking the rules and how difficult or easy it would be to just carry over some of the COVID-19 precautions into normal election administration. Does that mostly rely on Democrats being in control in statehouses, since they’ve been much more likely to make changes that ease the voting process?

Dayshifters: We’ve seen record early voting numbers this year, in part because of the record number of people who could vote early. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states expanded their mail-in ballot programs to include more voters, and many states also expanded early voting in order to ensure safer in-person voting on Election Day. But how likely do you think these expansions are to last?

We know that around 100 million Americans have already voted by mail or early in-person, which will surely amount to the largest amount of early voting in U.S. history. But on its own, that doesn’t intrinsically mean there’ll be record-setting turnout, as early votes could simply “cannibalize” Election Day votes that would have been cast anyway. Yet in combination with polling that shows very high levels of engagement, it does seem quite possible that this election will set a modern turnout record for a presidential election.

Since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, the highest presidential turnout among the voting-eligible population was roughly 62 percent in 2008, according to data from the United States Election Project. But the 2016 election wasn’t far off that mark, as some 137 million total voters cast ballots for president, which amounted to 60 percent turnout among the voting-eligible population.

However, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast has an average estimated turnout of about 158 million in the presidential contest, which would work out to 66 percent turnout among the voting-eligible population and far surpass even 2008’s showing. As the low end of our turnout estimate works out to 147 million votes — 62 percent turnout — it seems pretty likely that turnout will be up at least over 2016, if not over 2008, too.

And this may not be surprising given how much voters think this election matters and how energized they are. Back in early August, the Pew Research Center found that 83 percent of registered voters felt it “really matters who wins” in November, the highest percentage dating back to 2000. And in September, Gallup found that 71 percent of registered voters said they were “more enthusiastic” about voting than in the past, the highest figure Gallup had found dating back to 1996. Together, these sentiments seem likely to produce record-breaking turnout in 2020.