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Early voting has been going on for a a few days now in group of key states where it’s possible from the data that is being made available to get some indication of how the WH2020 battle is going.

Of course no votes have been counted yet – this is all derived from the numbers requesting to vote by mail linked and with what is known about them.

In several of the States where information is available we are told how many so far have requested to to vote in this way and sometimes what their registered party affiliations if these are known. Generally we are also able to find out whether or not they voted like this 4 years ago. It should be emphasised that each state operates elections differently and there is no consistent set of data available.

These are some of the highlights in the Politico report relating to the three closest swing states that Trump has to hold on to.

In Pennsylvania, which Trump won by just 44,000 votes four years ago, Democrats have built a lead of nearly 100,000 ballot requests from voters who didn’t participate in the 2016 election but are preparing to vote by mail this year, according to TargetSmart’s figures. In Michigan, where Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes (and where voters do not register by party), the firm’s model shows that Democratic-aligned voters have a nearly 20,000-person advantage among non-2016 voters signing up to receive ballots. In Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,000 votes, Democratic-leaning voters who skipped 2016 have made nearly 10,000 more requests for this election than their GOP counterparts.

Good figures, too, for Biden from Florida where the Democrat lead in vote-by-mail requests is 2.1m to 1.4m. At this stage at WH2016 the Democrats trailed behind the Republicans.

How good an indication this is we’ll have to wait until November. What this does do is to suggest that current polling is along the right track.

Mike Smithson