They can start counting mail in ballots before election night. Doesn't necessarily mean they'll have them all counted by election night.

I think Trumps winning Texas and Ohio with NC AZ and Florida being tossups. Overall im expecting Trump to have about the same nimber of votes he had in 2016 while Biden is up 2-3m from Clintons numbers.

I'd be very surprised if he could still pull off getting that many voters. Keep in mind he got a lot of independents onto his camp, something that shouldn't be possible this time around. Pretty sure Biden will win the popular vote by over 8M this year unless he crashed just before the finish line.

I'm actually more interested what the other parties will get in terms of voters. I am pretty sure that the greens will have a slight uptick while the libertarian party going down a bit, but we'll see about those only after the election I guess. And Maine having changed to single transferrable vote in their voting system should give them more power in that state already, as a vote for them is no longer a vote that's as good as thrown away.

Well 2018 midterms showed that a lot of Trump support stayed abouy the same. Covid happened this year so that could have a big impact but Republicans still have a lot of anticipation so I expect him to be either down up to 1m or up 1m. I think Biden wins 5-6m and third parties down a bit.

Forecast predicts a record turnout  of 150M+
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/2020-election-turnout/616640/
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/14/election-2020-a-once-in-a-century-massive-turnout/

so should be up by 11M+ overall at a minimum from 2020.

My guess is those vote will go towards Democrats heavily. 2016 already had somewhat of a galvanised republican voters base to vote for trump, but since then Trump has himself, for 4 years, made certain to galvinise democrats voters to go vote against him in 2020. 

I'll bet on a gap of 10M minimum of the popular vote in favor of Biden.

I'll also bet that most of the election night's "Surprises" if there is, will be at the benefice of democrats contrary to what happened in 2016.

I think the forecast will be wrong.

I really don't know about that...

In the Senate, the Republicans picked up seats, but only 1/3 of the seats of are up for reelection in any midterm election, and they happened to be in red states. 

Meanwhile, in the Congress race, which is nation wide, democrats had 53% of the vote, compared to 45% for republicans. This was a huge swing from 2016, where they won by about 1%. You'd have to think some of that reflects on Trump's appeal.

Why do you think that?

For the house races you need to take in account yhat 2018 had quite a  it progressives appealing to the far left Democratic base. In 2020 the biggest Democratic candidate is Biden so I doubt big Bernie bros and other far lefties will vote for Biden. 45% is only like 1% lower than what Trump got in 2016. 

Nvm the second part. Just took a look a look at some older numbers and 150m is possible. 

Speaking of the Senate, Democrats are now poised to flip the Senate this year, too:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/senate/

Still remember how the Republicans were sure they were safe as they thought most of their states that were up for reelection were too red to be flipped. Well, would you just look at that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Senate_elections#Predictions

While the Republicans will flip Alabama's special election seat as was expected beforehand, the Republicans are loosing states they really didn't expect to loose. Here's a little list of states that are expected to be flipped:

• Arizona (special)
• Colorado
• Maine
• North Carolina
• Iowa

Which would give the democrats 51 seats and thus the majority already even without the VP. Add to this the possibility of both Georgia elections become democratic as both are tossups, the republicans will probably loose everything this election.

It's 1% lower than what Trump got, but that's not really an apples to apples comparison, because we're talking about the generic ballot. The generic ballot has never lined up directly with the President's vote share, case in point 2016 where the party outperformed Trump by 4 points, so you can't treat 45% as what Trump would have gotten if he were running that year.

But, a swing in the generic ballot does tend to predict the incumbent party's candidate will fare worse in the election. So, it is a sign that Trump might lose support this year. And the rest of the signs seem to be pointing that way too.

I really haven't been keeping up with the Senate races. I know it's important, but I only have so much mental energy.

If the Democrats win and they follow the "it's constitutional, it's fair" philosophy... They can do some things that would make the republican party as we know it basically unviable. And honestly, those things wouldn't really be that crazy.