With just a week left for the 2020 US Presidential election, more than 64 million Americans have cast their ballots, with large voter turnout seen in the key battleground states that will ultimately decide who between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden wins the Electoral College and the US Presidency, according to a media report on Tuesday.
Voters are also turning out in large numbers in states that are more likely to favour Biden, such as California, New Jersey and Virginia. These states together account for more than a third of the votes cast so far and with early voting just getting started in states like New York these numbers are likely to climb, the New York Times reported.
Over 64 million Americans have already voted in the elections. About half of these votes are in the over dozen competitive states that will ultimately decide who wins the Electoral College, the report said.
"Possibly even more significant, early votes in these battlegrounds account for more than half of those states' total votes in 2016. Nationally, voters have already cast about 46 percent of the total vote counted in 2016," according to the United States Elections Project.
The report said that voter enthusiasm for and against Trump has also "fuelled record-level early turnout across the country".
Democrats appear much more eager about early voting as in the five battleground states that report party registration, nearly two million more registered Democrats have voted than Republicans so far, it said.
In battleground state of Pennsylvania, which Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016, more than three times as many Democrats have voted than Republicans.
Early votes in populous Texas, which leans Republican but is considered competitive this year because of its growing populations of people of colour, have already surpassed 80 per cent of the state's 2016 total turnout, the report said, adding that votes in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina account for more than 60 per cent of the total ballots that were cast in those states four years ago.
The report notes that early voting has been less extensive in states that are more likely to favour Trump.
These states tend to be less populous than many of the Democratic-leaning and battleground states, so it's not surprising that they make up a smaller share of total early votes. But their early votes are also smaller as a percentage of the number of people who voted four years ago.
NYT said Trump is hoping for a red wave of in-person voting on November 3 to overcome what appears to be an early voting advantage for Democrats.
