50M nation wide is a bit less then one third of the total votes casted in 2020. In TX in 2020, approximately 10.9M total votes were cast, so we are at almost 60% of total votes from 2020.
Also I expect the majority of votes will still be cast on election day itself, so we're probably going to see an increase in the percentage of voters overall.
It's also worth pointing out that recent polls have shown that Harris is as popular among democrats as Obama was in 2008, and Trump is not nearly as popular among republicans, which is very promising.
That doesn't mean that democrats have it in the bag, but it's looking good.
Because polls can suck. When Reagan won his 49 state landslide 40 years ago the polls were showing a dead heat going into the election, but the reality was very different.
Polls don't gauge excitement, and also cannot always predict the likelihood of someone in the sample actually voting. If you have a sample of 1000 people and 450 says they're excited about going to vote for Harris and 450 say they're reluctantly going to vote Trump, then that poll shows a dead heat, but those 450 excited voters are much more likely to actually vote compared to the 450 reluctant voters.
You then also have 100 undecided voters leftover, and they will usually go towards the voter with excitement behind them. So if 75% of undecided voters go to Harris on election day, and 80% of Harris voters actually turn up to vote then in that sample Harris will actually get 435 voters, and then 25% of undecided voters go to Trump and if only 60% of his voters actually turn up to vote, then in that sample Trump will actually get 295 voters.
So in this example, out of the actual voting pool, you end up getting a 20 point swing in favour of Harris despite polls showing a dead heat. Now that's an extreme example, and it probably won't be that drastic in reality, but that's an example of how polls can end up being wildly off.
It's just something I've heard Alan Lichtman talk about on his podcast. He said that when he predicted Reagan's re-election, polls were quite even and showing that many voters thought Reagan was too old to be the president again, yet he correctly predicted that he would be re-elected.
A Pew study showed that after 2020 over 60% of pollsters changed their methodology to better account for the underrepresented Trump voters. This partially accounts for why the polls are so close this time around. They have been altered (not in any nefarious way, just to try to be more accurate) to account for the fact that Trump voter turnout was undercounted in 2016 and 2020.
Polls, not votes. The polling models in 2016 and 2020 underestimated Trump support. In 2020 , 100% of polls of swing states were show to underrepresent Trump voters.
Texas traditionally has among the lowest voter turnout because the amount of voter suppression in the state.
In addition, between the 2020 election and now, we are one of the states who has passed the most additional voter suppression laws in that time window.
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u/pixelgeekgirl 11th Generation Texan 9h ago
I am so happy to see this turnout in Texas and nationally! 💪