For those trying to stay up to date with the election results as they continue to roll in, the ceaseless onslaught of numbers, data points and percentages has been staggering. As of Wednesday morning, the numbers show no signs of slowing down soon.
A few minutes before 5 a.m. MT, Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief of the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight.com, announced an eye-opening prediction regarding this year’s popular vote via Twitter: Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are on track to receive the top two popular vote totals in U.S. history, surpassing the record set by former president Barack Obama in 2008, per Deadline.
In the hours following Silver’s tweet, reports have come in indicating that Biden has indeed surpassed Obama’s 2008 popular vote total.
Citing reports from The Associated Press, the news site AJ+ tweeted that Biden had accrued more than 69.6 million votes, breaking Obama’s record-setting 69.5 million vote total from 2008.
According to a New York Times tweet published at 9 a.m. MT, President Trump has tallied 66.4 million votes so far.
The numbers aren’t expected to stop there, though. As Newsweek reported Wednesday morning, there are still millions of votes to be counted as nearly 100 million Americans cast their ballots early.
This election marks the highest voter turnout in over a century. According to CBS News White House Correspondent Ben Tracy, nearly 70% of registered U.S. voters cast ballots this year. The 2020 election is still far from decided as millions of votes have yet to be counted in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia, per CNN.