University of Florida Professor Michael McDonald is maintaining a public database of mail-in ballot activity across the country, and among the ballot submissions that political party breakdowns are available for, Democrats have a huge lead. In total, at least 866,734 mail-in ballots have been cast of Saturday morning, which is exponentially higher than comparable mail-in voting levels at this point during the 2016 presidential race. Among the states where party breakdowns are available for the mail-in ballots that have been submitted, Democrats have a huge lead — a full 53.9 percent of the 246,816 mail-in ballots for which party affiliation data is available were cast by registered Democrats. Just a meager 16.7 percent of those mail-in ballots were cast by registered Republicans.
#earlyvote update 9/26
At least 866,734 people have voted in the 2016 general election https://t.co/s8K2xFDeSA pic.twitter.com/Y6upIIBD9P
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) September 26, 2020
The states for which party affiliation data is available for mail-in ballot totals include Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. As of Saturday morning, North Carolina is the state where, by far, the most mail-in ballots have been cast, with a total of over 239,000 votes cast, according to the data from Professor McDonald. Trump won North Carolina, Iowa, and Florida in 2016, and each one of these three states will likely be worth watching closely in the upcoming election results. Besides the presidential race, Iowa has a closely watched U.S. Senate race, with incumbent Republican Joni Ernst running against Theresa Greenfield, who’s been in the lead in a slew of recent polling.
On the national level, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to run significantly ahead of Trump, as of Saturday morning. FiveThirtyEight had the Democratic pick leading Trump by an average of 7.2 percent on the national level as this weekend got underway, and the site gave him a 77 percent chance of winning the presidency as of that same time. The apparent widespread Democratic enthusiasm that’s reflected in the huge number of Democratic votes that have already been cast suggests that Trump may be well on his way to getting kicked out of office.
Trump has refused to commit to accepting the election results, insisting that he will wait and see what happens before making that determination. However, that is not and will never be Donald Trump’s role, period — he is not the arbiter of democracy.
