WASHINGTON — Heading into Election Day, 50 percent of adults are confident that the election will be conducted in a fair and equal way, according to new data from the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Tracking Poll.
Fourteen percent of adults say they are "very confident" and 36 percent say they are "somewhat confident." A combined 47 percent say they aren't confident that the election is being conducted fairly, with 32 percent saying they are not "too" confident, and 15 percent say they are "not at all" confident.
Confidence in the fairness of the election has risen since the summer. In August, just 43 percent of adults said they were confident that the election would be conducted fairly and equally, and 55 percent said they weren't confident.
President Donald Trump has continued to call the integrity of the election system into question, and he has argued against widespread voting by mail. He has repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that the historic number of mail-in votes will lead to massive ballot fraud. And he has argued that the election must be called by the end of Tuesday, even though it always takes states days or in some cases weeks to certify results.
A majority of adults also reported having already voted in the presidential election. Fifty-one percent say they had already voted, and 30 percent more say it is "absolutely certain" that they will vote. Just 8 percent of adults say they don't plan to vote in the presidential election.
Before Election Day, over 96 million Americans had already cast their ballots through early voting. The early vote total is nearly 69 percent of the total 2016 vote, and the 2020 early vote is about double the 2016 early vote.
According to the data from early voters, 54 percent of adults cast their votes early by mail, and 45 percent voted early in person.
Follow today's election news and results in our live blog
Of those who said throughout the week that they hadn't yet voted, 64 percent say they still plan to vote in person on Election Day, and that includes a pretty wide party split. Seventy-four percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican say they'll cast their ballots in person on Tuesday, while 54 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic say the same. Fifty percent of independents say they'll vote in person on Election Day.
Data come from a set of SurveyMonkey online polls conducted Oct. 26-Nov. 1, 2020, among a national sample of 91,214 adults in the U.S. Respondents were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. The modeled error estimate for this survey is plus or minus 1.0 percentage points. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education and geography using the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States ages 18 and over.
