Early voting in Texas is now reported at 113% of total 2016 turnout. On a county by county basis early voting turnout varies from 144% to 50%, with City and Suburban counties trending much higher than rural ones.
I prepared an interactive spreadsheet model for final estimated results (( freely downloadable at: drive.google.com/…. )
I estimated the Biden share of the early vote at the recorded final O’Rourke vote fraction x a “lean factor” based on repeated polling that showed early vote was cast at approximately 53% Biden. The “lean” factor inflates the county by county O’Rourke share (about 48% statewide) by a user selected percentage. Note please, that a 50% Dem vote only experiences 50% of the lean, etc.
Default parameter in the model is a 1.04 lean factor (which translates to a 2% shift in a 50-50 district). A lean of this magnitude seems well supported by the crosstab in recent polling. The default lean yields a Early vote of 50.6 “Biden”, and cross tabs on most recent polling cite 53% (which would imply a 1.09 lean factor.
The in person “residual” pool of voters is unknown. Polling indicates that statewide 10% of Democrats and 15-16% of Republicans plan to vote in person — and yielding a 39% Biden in person vote (corresponding to recent polling crosstabs). I developed an estimate of the “residual” pool by taking the maximum of the (2016 vote-Early vote) or alternatively for turnouts already above the 2016 value (and yielding a nonsensical negative number), an inflated turnout based on the statewide Dem and Republican polling tendency (as characterized by the O’Rourke proportion). This method of estimate functions to reduce the size of the residual pool in Democratic and high turnout counties, and increase the size of the residual pool in Republican/ rural counties.
My model predicts an overall statewide turnout of 10.8 million, or a scarce 1.2 million above the current “banked” vote.
As In Person voting will be biased toward Republican (per polling cross tabs) an interactive “deflation” parameter was added to reduce the O’Rourke percentage for the in-person cohort, reflecting the relative exhaustion of the Democratic voting pool.
I should note my percentages are based off “Biden votes” / Total votes. Importantly, historically, and in agreement with polling, Libertarian third party vote are about 3% statewide. There is some evidence that disenchantment with Trump will encourage “Libertarian” bleed off. Thus a (minimal) Biden win can likely be achieved with a 49 — 48 — 3 division.