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

For the first time in U.S. history, a voter is more likely to have voted before Election Day than on the day itself. That’s the takeaway from the massive early voting numbers we’re seeing around the country, as around 100 million people have already voted, according to the U.S. Elections Project. But let’s try to put that figure in perspective. In 2016, close to 40 percent of 137 million voters cast early ballots in some way, whether by mail or in person — the highest share ever, as the chart below shows.

Yet the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast estimates that anywhere from 147 million to 168 million people may vote in the 2020 election. So with 100 million or so votes already cast, that means that an overwhelming majority of voters will have voted before Election Day this year.

And the surge in early voting has been driven largely by Democrats, as somewhere around three-fourths of them planned to or already have voted before Election Day, whether by mail or in person, based on recent national polls. By comparison, only a little more than half of Republicans have said the same. In addition, polls suggest that early voting is up across many racial and ethnic groups, but most especially among Black voters, who lean heavily Democratic.

More complicated than what to do with voters who refuse to wear masks is the issue of what to do with election officials who refuse. In Texas, right now, an election judge and her poll workers in Dallas are refusing to wear masks, despite a GOP chair asking them to do so. According to Lauren McGaughy of the Dallas Morning News, there’s no way to remove this judge unless both the Democratic and GOP chairs agree. And while the GOP chair has said he wants mask wearing to happen, removal doesn’t seem to be on the table.

Democrats are favored to take control of the Senate in the 2020 elections, according to the final version of FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast. With the forecast set in stone as of early Tuesday morning, Democrats have a 75 in 100 chance of flipping the chamber. Republicans, meanwhile, have a 25 in 100 chance of keeping control — as likely as drawing a spade from a deck of cards.

However, as I wrote in our final forecast overview, “a ton of seats are still competitive; in 80 percent of our model’s simulations, Democrats wind up with anywhere between 48 and 55 seats.” And remember that’s a big range! The exact number of seats here matters, too, because it’s not just about control of the chamber. Winning 50 seats (plus the tie-breaking vice presidential vote) is a very different outcome for Democrats from winning 55 seats, as the size of their majority would affect how likely they are to pass their ambitious agenda. Not to mention, there are still a number of plausible outcomes in which Republicans retain control.