With election day around the corner, Americans are anticipating who will win the 2020 election. So far, we have had a record breaking 66 million early ballots; Texas took the lead in terms of highest early voters as of Tuesday, October 27. This is a remarkable turnout and many would speculate that this makes a huge difference on the outcome of the election. However, with the ongoing pandemic, it is easy for this information to be skewed and misleading. We don’t know if all these early voters would’ve voted anyways in a non-covid environment. Early voting facilitates election officials by helping them manage the election better. It also helps the respective parties figure out, based on the statistics of who voted for who, which group of individuals to appeal to. Contrarily, it serves as a disadvantage due to the difficulty of counting all the early votes, especially with delays in the postal system for mail-in voters. For example, more Democrats than Republicans have been reported to have voted early. This is still tentative, though, as it is equivocal whether the Democrats’ early edge will be offset by an influx of Republicans on election day. Democrats have requested more ballots in many key states.

Going by the data, states such as North Carolina and Florida are at a Democratic advantage, with 46% and 49% of the pre-election ballots cast towards the Democratic party respectively (keep in mind many of the voters don’t identify with a party so that also takes up quite a bit of the total percentage of early voters). Meanwhile, Trump has been focusing on a narrower set of states that he won four years ago like Minnesota and Nevada. Trump also issued a warning on mail-in voting, which comes with a big risk; if there is bad weather or long lines on election day, votes will be unfavorable for Donald Trump, who at this point is relying on in-person voting because Biden has been banking votes not just from reliable Democrats but also from unforeseen voters. Solely going on the statistics from early voting, Biden is at the advantage currently. Historically, early voting has never been an accurate predictor of the outcome of elections because there are numerous other factors that still need to be taken into consideration so it is still up in the air who will win the 2020 presidential election.