So here are some things I am going to watch for tomorrow.
First - the "swing counties." There were four: Jefferson (rural North Florida), Monroe (The Conch Republic), St. Lucie (Palm Beach media market), Pinellas (St. Petersburg/Clearwater). Beyond this, there are two counties that I suspect will flip if Biden wins: Duval (Jacksonville), and Seminole (suburban Orlando). I will likely go look at Pinellas and Duval first - mostly because they both have a history of returning VBM/EV pretty quickly.
Next: the "base counties" - I want to see how Dade is doing. I don't expect Biden to hit Clinton levels, but I would like to see him hit margins around Obama 2012. I also want to see Broward next door. I think there is a decent chance Broward hits margins enough to make up any loss from Clinton in Dade. Palm Beach is usually slow to report - but they have changed some things up, so hopefully we will get an early read there.
"Red Florida" - Sumter County is hard core red - it is home to the Villages. Trump won it by 39 points in 2016. Almost all of its vote will report early - so I will be curious as to the margins. Same for Pasco, a bay area county that Trump won by 53K votes in 2016 and returns results very quickly. Do the margins look the same, or do they look different. Volusia on the east coast is similar - it moved hard from Obama to Trump -- can Biden claw some of that back.
Sarasota is sometimes fast, sometimes slow in returns. I want to see it before making any judgements. Then what is the lead in the eastern time zone before the central time zone votes come in? Trump should win those central time zone votes by a max of 150,000 votes -- so are we up by enough to absorb that around 8pm?
Last time, we had a pretty good read on it before 8pm. I don't know how that changes with so many more votes - but I suspect we will know pretty early in the night.
Basically it comes down to two things: Can Democrats somewhat keep up with turnout tomorrow -- and are the NPA and partisan votes breaking as the polls suggest they are (Biden winning NPA, and winning a bigger share of GOP than Trump is of Dem)? If the NPA/partisan breaks hold, Biden can very much win without a partisan lead. How much? Well that depends?
For example, if the GOP has a one point advantage among all registered voters, under a model where both candidates get the same percentage of their own partisan vote (let's say 90-10), Biden would need a 5 point NPA lead to win by something close to the recount margin. But let's say Biden win's 11% of Republicans (89-11) compared to Trump getting 10% of Democrats (90-10), Biden will win by almost a point. As the GOP partisan advantage grows in turnout - these margins go up as well.
Your early data all looks good. For me, it's almost a sure thing. By my very very conservative estimate, D are 48k up right now. 200-300K should vote on the day. He'd need something like 300k and to carry it 60:40 to have any chance. Your state is a bit complicated because of how party registration works. If 82.2% of R voted Trump, he'd have over 1.24M votes alone meaning he carried 100% of the on the day vote. If that's correct, NO independent voters (or D voted) voted for him.) Which would be an impossibility, because to carry on the day voting like that, he'd need them.
Just adjusted my sleep pattern for the election, so there's that!
