One of the extraordinary things about the the American election on Tuesday is the level of early voting. This is partly being driven by the efforts of the Republicans to curtail it and of course ongoing suggestions that Trump will try to steal the election in some form.

The chart above is based on data from the the excellent election project site which is gathering huge amount of data and regular updates.

The States I’ve chosen to include in the chart are the battlegrounds and as can be seen in the 3 States with the the smallest Trump majorities from last time, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, have had a significantly lower levels than the other states in the chart which are of paper at least not as significant targets for the Democrats and Joe Biden.

Because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College I have put the number of Electoral College votes on the chart to emphasise why some states are much much more important than others.

Easily the stand out figures in the chart above because of the importance of their States in electoral College vote terms, are Florida and Texas. The latter, which doesn’t have much postal voting, has already seen more voting in this election than at the last presidential election when Trump beat Clinton by 11%. Two years ago in the midterms Beto O’Rourke, got within 2% in his bid to take the Texas senate seat and he has been masterminding the huge organisational effort in this massive state to to get early voting to very high levels.

We don’t know what these numbers actually mean in terms of of which candidates will benefit most but given that the Republicans in some states have worked very hard to restrain it my view is that the higher the figure the better news it is for the Democrats and Joe Biden.

As I have reported before my big bet in this election is on buying coming out top in Texas and I’m sticking with it.

Mike Smithson