But I also think that Texas going for Biden is very small: Trump is still leading by 2% or so by official polls. Its important to push Texas a little bit since there's a chance for victory.
In the most likely event: Texas goes red (as it has gone for the past several decades), and we're left wondering about Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as usual.
If Florida has an insurmountable lead on election night (like 5% or something), then Biden probably wins. But if its a 2% differential (too close to call by the media, and a serious counting effort starts to take place), like is currently projected in the polls, then Florida could very well drag out this election for a week or longer. Just like back in 2000.
Some other states like PA aren't even allowed to touch mail-in ballots til the morning of Nov 3rd. That's millions of envelopes that have to be opened, signatures verified, and then the ballot itself has to be unfolded and flattened and then pushed through the tabulation machines. But we don't have to fully wait til those are official--we can tell by the party registration on the ElectionsProject website who won based on in-person voting plus party mail-in.
It might be a science at a forensic level for investigations, but at this scale? I don't think so.
Also while I'm not going to imply I'm a typical case, I am not capable of writing a consistent signature due to a neurological condition. I think I still deserve a vote.
When challenged you have to reaffirm you submitted the ballot. You only “lose” your vote if you fail to respond.
YMMV but it seems to work pretty well here.
That’s interesting to know. what method do they contact you to and how big is your window to respond?
> Such signature comparison has long been deemed sufficiently reliable to legitimate absentee ballots and provisional ballots, and there is no reason to believe that it is any less reliable for confirming the identity of individuals voting in person.
It would suck to have my vote thrown away because some overworked election worker looks at it for a second and decides the letter P is bent the wrong way compared to the 1999 version.
Learning that votes are thrown out based on this just shows how “special” the US system is. I assume historically they just decided “hard to read” names got thrown out.
It's an entirely human process and imprecise might be the best word for it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia...
I also tend to like 538's model. 538's model gives Trump an average vote share of 2.2% more than biden (more than the polling average because the model thinks the demographics and fundamentals favor trump) but still gives Biden a 35% chance of winning. Biden winning is not very likely, but it's also not a not very small chance.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...
Coincidentally, that's pretty close to the odds that 538 gave to Trump winning overall in 2016.
Define "LEADING" please, because the actual numbers for voting in Miami-Dade county [1] as of today are:
Mail Voting
Rep 83,605
Dem 158,788
NPA 82,533 (NPA = No Party Affiliation)
In-Person Early Voting
Rep 61,273
Dem 61,548
NPA 35,296
Totals
Rep 144,878
Dem 220,336
In what way does that constitute Republicans "LEADING"?
[1] https://countyballotfiles.floridados.gov/VoteByMailEarlyVoti...
Clinton won Miami Dade by 30 points (65-35) and still lost Florida by 1.2%.
We do know how many registered voters from each party are voting in some circumstances.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-number... is a decent overview
It's not necessary to "believe" anything when it comes to Florida. We have the actual hard number of ballots requested and returned, broken down by party registration. More Democrats are voting via mail. They're also voting in-person in equal numbers to Republicans, at least so far.
I think we are in agreement here. That's what my link shows.
My understanding is that not all states collect party affiliation when sending ballots though. It's possible I'm misinformed though.
https://data.tallahassee.com/early-voting-turnout/florida/
About 500,000 more D than R voters have voted early. This is a MUCH bigger gap than we saw in 2016.
Beto O'Rourke has registered 1.8 million new voters in the past 4 years in the state of Texas, 300k of those were registered in the past 2 weeks. Beto lost Texas by 200k votes.
And so far, TX has been killing it in terms of early-voting. About 75%(!!) turnout so far than what they had in 2016. And we still have 11 days left to go before E-day. Biggest turnout percentage in the entire country so far.
It would be a mild surprise if Biden won Texas. It would be astonishing is Biden won Texas without also winning Florida.
He won Florida twice. Biden doesn’t have Obama’s charisma, so he basically has to bet on Trump frustration to carry Florida.
This election is a total question of Trump exhaustion. If people are exhausted from him then we’ll see the toss ups turn blue. If people are more frustrated with lockdowns, riots, protests, race coming to the surface in America (a lot of people don’t like that it’s being exposed and talked about), immigration, then toss ups go red.
I don’t think the pollsters probing for ‘Did Trump handle coronavirus well’ is the right thing to ask, mainly because I don’t think likely right-wing voters fault him. The same way they didn’t fault him for any of his access-Hollywood tapes, etc.
They are more likely to fault social welfare, crime, wealth redistribution, immigration, globalization - the same way they did in 2016. If they aren’t overwhelmed by Trump’s aggressiveness, then why would anything have changed in 2020? Just because the age 15-30 crowd on Reddit and the media lean one way doesn’t mean things actually changed in peoples minds.
Demographics in Texas have changed a lot since 2012 when Obama last ran. Democrats didn't really compete in Texas then.
> aggressiveness, then why would anything have changed in 2020
Take a look at the polls. Even if you don't believe the numbers themselves.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/20/texas-hous... is a decent summary. It's most likely that Republican will win Texas, but Democrats have roughly the chance of winning Texas as Trump did of winning the election in 2016.
We have polls to test this, and while it shows Republicans generally thing Trump can do no wrong, lots of independents think the response has been bad. And some of these are right wing voters, because the 57% who disapprove given the question "Do Americans approve of Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis?" is much higher than his generall disapproval rate.
See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/ and scroll down
Calibrate your expectations accordingly.
It would be astonishing statistically if Biden doesn't have a good margin in PA or FL but is competitive in TX.
If Biden were to win Texas, the GOP would be finished forever. Polls notwithstanding, Biden has as much chance of winning Texas as Trump has of winning California.
Because if you look at the polls that’s ridiculous (probability of Biden winning Texas is orders of magnitude larger than Trump winning California).
What do you mean when you say “chance”, if not probability?