WASHINGTONEarly voting is reported to be setting records with just two weeks to go to the presidential election, pointing to enthusiasm in the Democratic Party's base, which spells danger for US President Donald Trump's bid for re-election.
Take the state of Georgia, in the southern US, for instance. As of noon on Sunday (Oct 18), 1,451,131 voters had already cast ballotsa 152 per cent increase over the same point in 2016. Voting by absentee ballots has shot up 648 per cent over 2016.
"Early voting records are being broken each day," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Sunday.
Various analyses show that more than six times as several Democrats have cast their ballots than at the same point in 2016.
Nationwide, 28 million have voted and African Americans, traditionally a major part of the Democrat base, are a big part of that number.
In North Carolina, which began early voting last Thursday, black voters accounted for more than 30 per cent of turnout on the first daywell above their 23 per cent share overall in 2016, the Washington Post reported.
In Georgia, black voters accounted for about 32 per cent of mail and in-person votes cast through last Thursday, also outpacing their overall share of the electorate in 2016.
African-American Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher told the Washington Post: "There is no group of Americans who are more vested in this democratic experiment, historically, than the Black person in the United States of America. Black people are literally voting like their lives depend on it."
But nobody is writing off President Trump.
Delving deeply into separate polling data shows that he has made gains among some groupslike younger African Americans, college-educated Hispanics, and college-educated white people.
Republicans prefer voting in person. Mr Trump's support base may be narrow, but is fanatically loyal, and Mid-western states that powered him to the White House with a narrow margin of victory enabling him to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote in 2016, will mostly vote in person on Nov 3.
The President has also been questioning the integrity of the electoral process itself, in particular mail-in ballotsand has been urging voters to go to the polls in person. There is thus less of an imperative for his supporters to vote early.
"I can't help but look at this data with the lens of Trump telling Republicans so consistently that vote-by-mail is a scam," Mr Josh Mendelsohn, CEO of Mr Michael Bloomberg's data firm Hawkfish, told Axios. "That distrustit bears out in this data."
Certainly, Mr Trump is running 10.5 points behind challenger Joe Biden nationally, and 7 to 7.5 points behind in tipping states, according to statistician Nate Silver, founder of the Five Thirty Eight website which tracks poll data.
"Trump's chances are fairly low and could get lower," Mr Silver tweeted on Sunday. But he added: "Don't assume the race is in the bag for Biden."
"We think that our model is correctly interpreting polling and other evidence. But (the President's chances) are not zero."
Mr Trump still has a 12 per cent chance of winning the Electoral College, according to a Five Thirty Eight model as at Sunday afternoon.
Separately the Cook Political Report's running Electoral College estimates project Democrats winning 290 electoral votes in the "Solid, Likely and Lean" categories.
The magic number that spells a majority in the Electoral College, is 270.
In 2016, Mr Trump won 304 in what was seen as one of the greatest political upsets in modern history.