Using Brandwatch Qriously, we surveyed 5,409 adults in America from October 29 to November 1 2020. The above results come from the 3,505 respondents who say they are likely to vote or have already voted in tomorrow’s election.

Biden leads with 52% of decided likely voters supporting him against Trump’s 41%, a margin of 11 points. This is a very strong lead at the national level and, based on 538’s analysis, would almost definitely mean a Biden presidency.

We should still note that this lead isn’t uniform across the country. Within swing states, the margins are much smaller. And while the big picture is very positive for Biden, it doesn’t mean there won’t be any upsets.

When we look at our data by demographics, there are few surprises. But if we compare our age data to the Pew Research Center’s on the 2016 election, we can see signs of a shift.

In our data, Biden is significantly ahead in the 18-24, 25-34, and 65+ age groups, while Trump doesn’t come out ahead in any of the age groups. Compared to 2016, support in the 65+ category is nearly reversed. Trump won this group by nine points four years ago. Our data suggests now he’s likely to lose among these older voters by around seven points.

Early birds

This election has seen record early voting, and is on track to have a massive overall turnout. But due to the nature of how some states count early votes, we may not know who has won in some places until later in the week—or possibly even longer, if any legal wrangling takes place.

This presents a problem. First, people who vote early tend to vote differently to those who vote on the day.

Biden has a large lead among those who’ve already voted, but Trump is ahead among those yet to vote.

Different states have different rules on how to count early votes. In places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are key battleground states, they won’t start counting till election day.

Thanks to the unprecedented number of early votes, it’s likely they won’t have a final result until the end of the week. That’s not to mention the other states where mail-in ballots received after November 3 but postmarked before are still counted.

For this reason, we can expect to see a pattern of “blue shift” in those states which count mail-in ballots from election day onwards. This means we could see Trump’s chances looking rather good early on, with Biden’s numbers improving as more early votes are added to the tally.

In normal times, this would just mean a delay in a winner being declared. But with the President himself calling for the election to be wrapped up on November 3, things could get very complicated, very quickly.

As we do every week, we’re releasing our polling data along with our bulletin. If you want to have a dig around or do your own analysis, you can find our tables and the raw data here.

We’ll be back on November 11 with a post-election analysis to finish things off.