November 2nd, the day before the election, and things are… interesting.

If you go by all the polls, it appears Joe Biden will win, though Donald Trump does have at least a statistical chance of pulling it off.

I know what you’re saying: Didn’t the pollsters predict Hillary Clinton would win in 2016?

They did, for the most part, but the reality is that 2016 was a far different election than the one about to formally occur tomorrow.

To begin, Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate. To some extent, she was a victim of many years of Republican smears. She was also a victim of Comey’s idiotic decision to, a week from the election, make a formal announcement about… jeeze, I’m not even sure what he was saying back then. Emails? Hard drives? Seems silly considering what’s occurred since then. Finally, Mrs. Clinton didn’t help herself by ignoring certain states toward the end of the election.

Like most people, she seemed to assume the election was in the bag and perhaps let off the proverbial gas toward the end while those who voted for Trump were either a) completely won over by him and excited to vote for him or b) were people who shrugged and decided “Hey, why not? He’s better than Hillary.”

Maybe.

Thing is, we’ve now had nearly four years of Trump’s presidency and if what I wrote above is true, I think there are many people who decided to give Trump a try who are today no longer interested in continuing this particular experiment. Though there’s no way to quantify them, I think there are a pretty large number of usually reliable Republicans and those who thought “Hey, why not?” who are now thinking: “No way.”

The early voting, as of this particular moment and according to Barbara Sprunt for NPR, stands at an eye-popping 93 million early votes. The article linked to, by the way, is from yesterday at 5 pm.

Again according to the article, that represents some 68% of the total votes cast in the 2016 election, and we haven’t even gotten to the actual election date!

Florida, my state, ended early voting yesterday, allowing preparations today for the formal votes tomorrow.

Our state, as usual, is something of a toss up. Current polling indicates a dead heat, with Biden and Trump both getting about 47/48 percent of the votes.

The fact is, if Biden takes Florida, Trump is done. If Biden loses Florida, however, he has plenty of other chances to still win the election.

That, in a nutshell, is Trump’s problem: He has a very narrow path to getting the 270 electoral college votes needed to win while Biden has so many openings/availabilities. Trump needs to win certain states or else. Biden can hope for many combinations to get to the goal.

The state I have to admit I’m most curious about is Texas. Current polling puts Biden and Trump, like in Florida, in a statistical dead heat at 47/48 percent. However, given the astonishing amount of early voting, I’m thinking the edge has to be with Biden… at least at this point.

Why?

Because I suspect those who are early voting, in general, are doing so to kick out the incumbent. The fact is that those most excited to vote are usually in two camps: 1) Those who love their candidate and want him/her to remain in office and 2) Those who hate the current person(s) in power and want them out.

I tend to think we’re seeing more of #2 because Trump has never been a very popular figure. In fact, he never once broke the 50% positive barrier during his presidency, usually falling somewhere in the low 40% range in terms of approval.

He’s a deeply unpopular president, in that respect, and this is the people’s chance to get rid of him and, from what I can see, many are taking advantage to do just that.

Going over to fivethirtyeight.com, we find that as of today, Biden has moved from “favored” to win the election to “clearly favored” to win. This is because Biden now has a 90% chance of winning while Trump’s odds have dropped to 9%. There is a 1% chance of an electoral college “tie”…

While Trump still isn’t mathematically eliminated from re-election, this is the sort of stuff that makes me hopeful.

I’ve said it before and I won’t make any bones about it: I feel Trump has been the very worst president I’ve certainly ever seen in office. His lies, bloviating, incompetence, and general hateful attitude is a big turn off and, should he lose, I’ll certainly shed no tears for his departure.

One more day to go.

Let’s see what happens.