Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast. We are, the thing is

upon us folks, it is October 28th the election is next Tuesday

November 3rd it's right around the corner this is our last regularly

scheduled podcast before the election so So it has all come down to this.

And you know, just before we went on air,

Kate and David and I were talking about that from our rough calculations just kind of talking about it here,

it seems like close to half the vote has already happened in early voting. Now we're looking at some

numbers as of this morning and how many votes have been cast so far that's always

going to lag a touch behind right you're not yet going to have the people

who voted yesterday afternoon necessarily included in those numbers, and we are measuring

that against the total vote from 2016.

Now, obviously, it is,

there's, the population of the country

is slightly larger than it was four years ago. It is, it seems inevitable that you will have

substantially higher turnout. But still, you already, if we judge the benchmark as 2016 we already are roughly you know more or less at halfway

which you know that that's a big big deal and whether or not you know if it ends up

being something like 50% of the vote when we actually kind of know the total

number of votes that are going to be cast in

2020 or if it's 60% or whatever that is a pretty big deal because that means a big

big big part of the election is already baked has already happened and for those

votes doesn't matter what happens tomorrow or Friday it's done it's already

happened and that is that's been something that has been creeping up on us in recent cycles

...