Rachel Maddow won't say so directly, but this is great news for Democrats:

RACHEL MADDOW: Today is the day that early in-person voting starts in Florida. Also, early voting today starts in Texas.

And there is something going on with early voting this year.

Let's look first at Georgia. By this point in the last mid-term elections (2018 was the last mid-term) the number of people who had voted early in Georgia was huge. It was a record beating number in 2018: 434,000 people. That was seen at the time as being unfathomably large for early voting. That was 2018. If you compare that to four years earlier, 2014, the 2018 numbers tripled what they had done in 2014. 430,000 votes by this point in 2018? Three times the early votes that had been cast by that point in the mid-terms. Just huge. 2018, just over 430,000 people had voted. That was unimaginably large in terms of Georgia's records. Well, now, it is the next mid-term after 2018.

What is early voting in Georgia look like today?

According to the Georgia Secretary of State's office, the number of people who voted early this year is well over 750,000. That's almost as high as the number of people who will voted by this time in the general election in Georgia in 2020, in the presidential year when it was Joe Biden on the ballot. The mid-term elections the same numbers effectively as the presidential election? The presidential general election? That kind of early voter turnout in an election year is not just unheard of, it is almost like science fiction. 400,000 was mind blowing four years ago. Now it is over 750,000?

It's a whole new world.

A huge surge in early voting in Georgia this year. It is not just happening in Georgia.

• In North Carolina, requests for absentee ballots there are up 114% compared with the last mid-term.
• In Ohio, the number of people voting early is up 75% from the last mid-term.
• In Florida, the total number of people who have already voted early by mail, it's up 50% already from the last mid-term.

For all the efforts on the Right this year to make voting scary and harder, and disproportionately threatening to voters, especially people of color, for all those efforts, even tonight, lots of Americans are showing up to vote early. In record numbers in multiple states this year.

And obviously, these numbers, you know, they just tell you "numbers." They don't tell you anything about who will necessarily win the election, but it does tell you that people are willing to show up and vote and that's good news for a country essentially voting on whether or not we'll continue to have elections. Whether or not we are going to continue to be a democracy.

Seeing this many Americans turning up despite all the headwinds to cast their votes this year of all years. I don't know if you have cockles in your heart, but if you do, they're probably warned by this.

Early voting begins in Texas today, and in Florida. Watch this space.

The idiot god of the Republican Party, Bloaty McCriminal, is still discouraging Republicans from voting early.

And there are simply, by raw numbers, more of us than there are of them. Higher turnout is always great news for Democrats.

VOTE!!!